Posted on 03/22/2007 6:21:06 AM PDT by grey_whiskers
John W. Backus, the software pioneer who developed Fortran, died earlier this week at 82. His Fortran brainchild was an important watershed in computing because it freed programmers from the tyranny of writing machine code.
Back in the Ice Age of the electronic digital computer -- the 1950s -- there were just a handful of computers. It took a few years to build a computer then, but what made them even more forbidding was the labyrinth that had to be entered to create the machine code that made them do anything of use.
(Excerpt) Read more at informationweek.com ...
DO I=1,82
The first language I learned.......
Even before English? Amazing!
Yeah yeah yeah.....LOL
I loved him in Gilligan's Island, but I think he stole his computer ideas from The Professor.
...and don't forget doing those programs on punch-cards! ...Wasn't THAT fun?
What's a "punch card"? We have tens of thousands of them at the office, relics of another time. They are great used as notepads. LOL!
Honestly, I've heard stories from the older guys telling us about those days. It must have been hell! /salute
As I remember it, the three biggest problems were:
1. that cardpunch machines were totally unforgiving - if you made a typo, you started over with a new card, and
2. the card decks (programs) had to stay in exact order - easy to do, but DON'T drop them! - and they were not the slightest bit inclined to STAY in order unless you were ever-vigilant with them, and
3. that the card READER machines were often referred to as the 'card-mangler' machines so, even if YOU did everything right, the card-reader could STILL do your program in!
I heard a horror story regarding that very thing! The guy has been in IT for 30 years. He said he had worked for days(I think). He was getting ready to put his work to use and dropped the cards. He said for a brief moment he contemplated suicide lol. He told me after that he numbered his cards with a pen.
Before my time. But I remember watching a sibling building a FORTRAN program on cards for a college assignment. The notion of subroutines arose from the punch card days -- the pros would have a rubber-banded deck of cards for square root, pi, whatever, and use 'em over and over.
Yes. ...and...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1804912/posts?page=9#9
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1804912/posts?page=10#10
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