[norwaypinesavage]

I learned Fortran in 1966 in college. I used it enough such that in 1990 when I took my PE exam, I remembered that 1H1 was a "Hollerith Literal" that advanced the line printer to the top of the next page. To those of you who have never heard of a 'line printer'- bug off.

I actually used Fortran very little. We had an IBM 360, with its much dreaded 'Job Control Language'. JCL had to be the worst set of operating system commands ever invented. I stuck with DTSS Basic. It spoke mostly English, a feature, BTW, I think helped launch DOS in the PC market. Does anyone still remember that the original IBM PCs would boot to a hardware Basic Interpreter if there were no floppies in the drives?

[FreedomPoster]

I had an IBM-PC so early it still came with the (never used) cassette port for mass storage. 16K soldered to the motherboard, DIP sockets for adding 3 rows of 16k chips to get you all the way to a whopping 64K!

And yes, I realize this is nothing in the way of early computers.

I used the PC’s interpreted BASIC to do a graduate level engineering numerical methods class. It kept me from having to drive down to the computer center, where I could have used FORTRAN on the CDC Cyber. The PC was slow, but I’d get things set up and running, and then let it run overnight to converge to a solution. It beat getting in a car!

[Professional Engineer]

Now we’re getting nostalgic.

Fortan 77 was my 2nd language.