And the net was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the core of the lightguide. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the Usenet.
And God said, Let there be Fortran: and there was Fortran.
O’reilly has a PDF entitled The History of Programming Languages. It starts with Fortran and traces the development of over 2500 programming languages.
Whether you agree with Fortran as the original language or not, it’s still pretty cool.