Happy Birthday Fortran!

Well, it was actually yesterday that Fortran was 50 years old:
http://www.fh-jena.de/~kleine/histor...rTheIBM704.pdf.

Regards,

Mike Metcalf

Michael Metcalf <michaelmetcalf@compuserve.com> wrote:
> Well, it was actually yesterday that Fortran was 50 years old:

> http://www.fh-jena.de/~kleine/histor...rTheIBM704.pdf.

I had it in one of my posts that would have been Oct 15th in
most of the world, and half the US. I was surprised not to
see any other comments yesterday.

-- glen

Michael Metcalf wrote:
> Well, it was actually yesterday that Fortran was 50 years old:
> http://www.fh-jena.de/~kleine/histor...rTheIBM704.pdf.

I see that the manual is dated October 15, but the text says that the
compiler would be released later. According to
http://www.fortran.bcs.org/2007/jubileeprog.php , the first public
presentation was in February 1957 and the first delivery in April 1957.
The link is to a British Computer Society page about a celebration in
January.

So can we have three parties?

Steve

In article <1161021482.807395.99320@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.c om>,
Steve Lionel <steve.lionel@intel.com> wrote:

>So can we have three parties?

Well, Fortran users are the type of people who held 2 parties for the
millenium, so why not 3 for our favorite language?

-- greg

Michael Metcalf wrote:
> Well, it was actually yesterday that Fortran was 50 years old:
> http://www.fh-jena.de/~kleine/histor...rTheIBM704.pdf.
>
> Regards,
>
> Mike Metcalf

Wow. It's older than I.
Fortran can be my big-brother-in-program.
Happy birthday to Fortran.

Mike

Only 50? Why, that was only yesterday!
I must say it was a bit easier than Soap and assembler, which in turn
were better than flipping bit switches on a box they sold in "Wireless
World"
Then there was that Mr Lancaster's TV display hack; and Pong.......

Greg Lindahl wrote:
> In article <1161021482.807395.99320@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.c om>,
> Steve Lionel <steve.lionel@intel.com> wrote:
>
>> So can we have three parties?
>
> Well, Fortran users are the type of people who held 2 parties for the
> millenium, so why not 3 for our favorite language?
>

Indeed. 3 is a particularly auspicious number for the language that brought us
the arithmetic IF, eh?

Rich

In a previous article, "Terence" <tbwright@cantv.net> wrote:
>Only 50? Why, that was only yesterday!
>I must say it was a bit easier than Soap and assembler, which in turn
>were better than flipping bit switches on a box they sold in "Wireless
>World"
>Then there was that Mr Lancaster's TV display hack; and Pong.......
>
And before that the old adding clunkity clunk clunk adding
machines - we once found the right numbers to enter that
would give us the beat for Good King Wenceslas - ending
with clunk cluuunk clunk.
Chris

Chris Meek wrote:
> And before that the old adding clunkity clunk clunk adding
> machines - we once found the right numbers to enter that
> would give us the beat for Good King Wenceslas - ending
> with clunk cluuunk clunk.

I worked in 1961 on helping the Thames Water Board (recently sold last
week for umpty billion) on calculating what they did with the water.
This IBM 90-something "calculating printer" had by then clunked its way
up to 1945 on the mouldering punched cards from Mr Hollerith, such was
the speed of these new machines; why in 10 more years, they expected to
be up-to-date and have decent printed (!) historic data to work on....

Then there was this new "drum" machine with (count-them) 50 places to
store numbers, if you could work out when a space was passing......