30 Mar
2020
30 Mar
'20
10:53 a.m.
I was preparing to make the leap and buy my first personal computer--a
PDP-8/E back in the day. The attraction was not just the low price of
around $5000, but the fact that there was FORTRAN available for it. DEC
made a big deal of that in their promotions.
Wrote an emulator for it (in FORTRAN, of course) and still have my copy
of Introduction to Programming". Never got the machine, however--other
things got in the way.
I still routinely deal with FORTRAN (capitalize the name for dialects
earlier than F90). It's still hard to beat for a portable, fast
mathematical HLL. The big competitor back in the day from Europe,
Algol, appears to have disappeared from collective consciousness.
--Chuck