John Backus, team leader for IBM in the 1950s, and credited for 'inventing' FORTRAN has passed away. Backus assembled a small group of IBM employees to "develop an easier way to program IBM's new 701 machine". What resulted was, in 1954, a paper titled, "Preliminary Report, Specifications for the IBM Mathematical FORmula TRANslating System, FORTRAN." Backus stayed with IBM for nearly 40 years before retiring in 1991.
Having learned FORTRAN 77 as my first 'real' language, on a CDC Cyber 205, I still have a fondness for it. I recall many a night, as an undergrad, punching cards containing what today seems like trivial lines of code, but at the time was a very complex problem. Waiting for the card reader to swallow the stack of waxed color coded cards containing FOR loops and SUBROUTINE brings back a flood of emotions and memories. Will the program compile? Will the card reader jam? When will I get my output? The undergraduate lab was in the basement of the Weber building on the campus of Colorado State University and as such there was a unique smell that came from being below ground level in an old building. A set of electrical conduits clearly visible because it was easier to run the power cables outside the walls created an industrial effect.
Side Note: Most creative use of the waxed punch cards? A civil engineering professor I worked for used the small rectangular chaff as surface analysis visual aids when filming hydrodynamics in river and flood plain studies. He'd have me duplicate a card that had every possible hole punched. I would go through boxes of minty fresh cards reducing them to Swiss cheese. We would then sprinkle the chaff on the surface and film the swirls and eddies.
Showing posts with label FORTRAN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FORTRAN. Show all posts
Thursday, 22 March 2007
Wednesday, 21 February 2007
Women in Science
The retired IBM scientist Frances E. Allen whose pioneering work in the field of compilers will receive the Association for Computing Machinery's A.M. Turing Award. Allen is the first woman to receive this honor -- the highest honor in computer science.
Allen worked for IBM in the late 1950s where she taught a new language, FORTRAN, to IBM scientists.
"There is an image about our profession that doesn't appeal to women, which is a shame because women in our field are just fabulous. They're great researchers. They're great leaders. There just aren't enough of them. This has been an issue for many years." -- ACM CEO John White.
Blogger's note: Young women, for many reasons, are turned away from science at the middle school (junior high school) level. To combat this trend I suggest reading 4000 Years of Women in Science and doing what you can to encourage more women into the sciences. It is our culture that is turning these great talents away, not their desire nor their abilities.
Allen worked for IBM in the late 1950s where she taught a new language, FORTRAN, to IBM scientists.
"There is an image about our profession that doesn't appeal to women, which is a shame because women in our field are just fabulous. They're great researchers. They're great leaders. There just aren't enough of them. This has been an issue for many years." -- ACM CEO John White.
Blogger's note: Young women, for many reasons, are turned away from science at the middle school (junior high school) level. To combat this trend I suggest reading 4000 Years of Women in Science and doing what you can to encourage more women into the sciences. It is our culture that is turning these great talents away, not their desire nor their abilities.
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