197 7 ACM Turing Award Lecture The 1977 ACM Turing Award was presented to John Backus at the ACM Annual Conference in Seattle, October 17. In intro- ducing the recipient, Jean E. Sammet, Chairman of the Awards Committee, made the following comments and read a portion of the final citation. The full announcement is in the September 1977 issue of Communications, page 681. "Probably there is nobody