Free Republic

Mainframe systems are still the backbone of much of today's IT infrastructure. Yet, finding IT talent to maintain these systems, and the COBOL and Fortran languages that support them, is becoming increasingly difficult. The trouble is that all of the people who know how to maintain these systems -- while preparing to bolt on next-gen apps -- are aging out of the workforce, and there are no Millennials eagerly lining up to take their spots. Mainframes require knowledge of COBOL and Fortran, languages that are not considered particularly sexy these days. It's not hard to see why no one wants...

Fortran: Where general-purpose programming began.The list of high-tech tools in continuous use since the early 1950s isn't very long: the Fender Telecaster, the B-52, and Fortran.Fortran (which started life as FORTRAN, or FORmula TRANslator) was first created by IBM programmer John Backus in 1950. By the time John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, FORTRAN III had been released and FORTRAN had the features with which it would become the predominant programming language for scientific and engineering applications. To a nontrivial extent, it still is.Whereas COBOL was created to be a general purpose language that worked well for creating applications for business...

Microsoft has formed a new group to better its share of the market for the most powerful computers in the world. Its plan of attack: make the machines easier to use. On Monday, Microsoft said it has created an effort called the Technical Computing Initiative focused on the field of high-performance computing, in which dozens to thousands of PCs are lashed together to jointly perform complex calculations beyond the capacity of individual machines. Microsoft has quietly staffed up the group with several hundred employees and is launching a marketing push with a new website touting trends in high-performance computing. While...

Both Steve McIntyre and I are mentioned in this comprehensive summary. I’ve posted some excerpts below, with a link to the full report in PDF form. It is well worth a read. – Anthony Cold facts about the hot topic of global temperature change after the Climategate scandal THE WHISTLE BLOWS FOR TRUTH The whistleblower deep in the basement of one of the ugly, modern tower-blocks of the dismal, windswept University of East Anglia could scarcely have timed it better. In less than three weeks, the world’s governing class – its classe politique – would meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, to...

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.

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82. Skip to next paragraph I.B.M. John W. Backus in the late 1990s. Fortran was released in 1957. His daughter Karen Backus announced the death, saying the family did not know the cause, other than age. Fortran, released in 1957, was “the turning point” in computer software, much as the microprocessor was a giant step forward in hardware, according to J.A.N. Lee,...