Who is the world's oldest working programmer?

On Behalf Of ben IBM card reader. I beg to differ. For many years 9-track tape was the basic method of interchange. A Mini-Reel could hold a reasonable amount of data and yet could easily be popped into a jiffy bag. As for being "portable" provided one stuck to the standard Fortran was extremely portable. Issue may have arisen when the extensions were used but there was a host of software that would, possibly with tweaks run on most anything. A typical example is CSMPII which was released for the IBM1130 so I guess around 1965. The 1130 might be an IBM system and usually had a card reader, but in no way is it a Mainframe!. Any way CSMP is IMHO a typical piece of scientific or engineering Fortran, except rather than being for a specific purpose was a general purpose analog computer simulation. It was "freeware" and very soon found its way onto a host of other systems including PDP-8, PDP-11 and PDP-10 most of which didn't have card readers and interestingly to the IBM/360 where there was a card reader. If my memory serves me correctly, at least "later on" whenever that is, there were the DEC extensions to Fortran which hindered portability. However when I worked at NERC in the UK we often moved Fortran between Honeywell, DEC and IBM machines with little effort. The GEC 4000 Fortran did kick up issues because of the way it treated single precision constants (1.0 as opposed to 1.0D0) which was a PITA for scientists used to DEC fortran. Even plotter output could was pretty portable. Most suppliers provided a clone of the Calcomp HCBS (I think I have that write) or there were higher level libraries. For Numerical Algorithms the NAG library (which still exists http://www.nag.co.uk/numeric/fl/FLdescription.asp) or the IBM Scientific Subroutine Package (SSP) were also portable (Like CSMP , SSP was freely re-distributable)... Having "C" is not the answer to every maiden's prayer. If you are interested in Scientific Programming then it may be if it's a small platform that whilst it has a "C" complier it doesn't have the libraries you need to run your program. If it will run every "C" program then you can always compile the Hercules Mainframe Emulator and load the free VM/370 which comes with three Fortran implementations (G, H and Watfiv).. Dave G4UGM