9 Feb
1999
9 Feb
'99
6:30 a.m.
Date sent: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 08:28:30 -0800
Subject: Re: Piece of classic FORTRAN code
From: ckaiser(a)oa.ptloma.edu
To: classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu
Send reply to: classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu
Hah. My father was a Fortran-II programmer. The extent
of his error debug
sessions was
ERROR
It took him all semester to do one program, and he was the first in his class.
Ah yes...the 60's technology extended into the early 80's on many
mainframes :)
Given your birth year, I'd guess your father was doing his
programming in 1970-1976 or so. In 1970 I was programming
FORTRAN during interactive sessions on a Burroughs B6700
running MCP (hierarchical file system, multi-programming, multi-
processing, virtual memory).
OTOH, in 1969 I took a FORTRAN class taught at a different school,
where we had to use a CDC 3600. In an entire semester, we never
got to "SUBROUTINE".
My point, if there is one, is that the IBMs and CDCs (and others) of
the world have a lot to be blamed for, along with things to be praised
for. :)