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On September 20, 1954, the first FORTRAN computer program was run. An excerpt from the article:
"From its creation in 1954, and its commercial release in 1957 as the progenitor of software, Fortran (FORMula TRANslator) became the first computer language standard, “helped open the door to modern computing,” and may well be the most influential software product in history. Fortran liberated computers from the exclusive realm of programmers and opened them to nearly everybody else. It is still in use more than 50 years after its creation."
"From its creation in 1954, and its commercial release in 1957 as the progenitor of software, Fortran (FORMula TRANslator) became the first computer language standard, “helped open the door to modern computing,” and may well be the most influential software product in history. Fortran liberated computers from the exclusive realm of programmers and opened them to nearly everybody else. It is still in use more than 50 years after its creation."
IBM100 - FORTRAN
Posted from ibm.com
Computers
Programming
World History
American History
Languages
Posted 3 y ago
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Interesting computer history share SGT (Join to see) .... although I hated those punch cards in the college FORTRAN class that I took. They were necessary and required for the computer code at the time.
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Thanks for the great read! I'm not quite old enough to have written FORTRAN in its prime, but I did get a little experience in the early 90s with a GIS system at a local electric co-op. It's amazing how far languages have come since the early days of assembly languages and then FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG, and the like. I write in Python and PowerShell pretty frequently (although, I'm not a *real* developer) and long for the days of more directly solving problems without all the modern fluff.
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My recollection of FORTRAN (I was a COBOL programmer) was that it was frequently misapplied to commercial uses where COBOL or perhaps RPG would have been better choices.
One installation where I worked forced us to use a FORTRAN based extract-list general purpose program of some sort for ad hoc management report requests. The simplest request would take about a 10 minute compile time, and then generate over 20 pages of a link-edit map before the report was produced.
One installation where I worked forced us to use a FORTRAN based extract-list general purpose program of some sort for ad hoc management report requests. The simplest request would take about a 10 minute compile time, and then generate over 20 pages of a link-edit map before the report was produced.
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