The Computer History Museum collected an oral history[0] of John Backus[1] and there's some discussion about what computing was like when Fortran was created.

I really enjoy CHM's oral histories. I'm slowly working my way thru all of them and there are some real gems in there (Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Margaret Hamilton, Gordon Moore, Fred Brooks, John Warnock, etc).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDsWTyLEgbk

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Backus