2 May
2024
2 May
'24
12:20 a.m.
On Wed, 1 May 2024, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
Yet FORTRAN, the granddaddy of them all, continues
on... It should be
noted that FORTRAN celebrates its 70th anniversary this year:
I didn't start until May 29, 1965.
I had previously been doing some keypunching, and 084 counting sorter.
IBM did the data processing for the CBS "National Drivers Test"; they
actually succeeded in using port-a-punch cards sent through the US postal
system!
My father did the analysis. You can see him behind Walter Cronkite,
frantically manually adding numbers where IBM's flawed results didn't add
up close enough to 100%.
He decided that contracting out programming was too risky.
On May 29, he placed a copy of Mc Cracken and Decima Anderson's books on
the dining room table. And, we started to learn the basics of
programming.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com