net-traveller Posted March 21, 2007 Share Posted March 21, 2007 Yes I know that this is probably not of interest to many but those old programmers out there may just remember Fortran. For me it was one of two programming languages for City & Guilds and 'A' level, the other being ICL assembler, those were the days :-) . The creator of this language has just died. http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2185927/founder-fortran-dies RIP Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mom Posted March 21, 2007 Share Posted March 21, 2007 To everything there is an end. RIP.I studied Fortran at college, but the best I ever did was a chess board on the screen and a program to determine mean and standard deviation of white blood cell distributions. But I have always used i and j as variables through the years, in memory of fortran!I spent many years programming in ICL assembler too! On an ICL System 25. A total of 20 partitions, but one was the clock, physical switching, possible 10 users per partition sharing the same program at the same time by raising service requests, maximum 78k user space per partition, 10 byte instruction set that allowed instruction editing during processing. Those were the days when, because of the extreme constraints on memory, you would store variable data in the unused 5 bytes of an unconditional branch instruction, just to get by. A world so completely foreign to the new generation of programmers who so quickly sacrifice efficiency for functionality. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GJH Posted March 21, 2007 Share Posted March 21, 2007 mom - 2007-03-21 2:04 PMTo everything there is an end. RIP.I studied Fortran at college, but the best I ever did was a chess board on the screen and a program to determine mean and standard deviation of white blood cell distributions. But I have always used i and j as variables through the years, in memory of fortran!I spent many years programming in ICL assembler too! On an ICL System 25. A total of 20 partitions, but one was the clock, physical switching, possible 10 users per partition sharing the same program at the same time by raising service requests, maximum 78k user space per partition, 10 byte instruction set that allowed instruction editing during processing. Those were the days when, because of the extreme constraints on memory, you would store variable data in the unused 5 bytes of an unconditional branch instruction, just to get by. A world so completely foreign to the new generation of programmers who so quickly sacrifice efficiency for functionality.I was IBM and COBOL myself - with a bit of IBM Assembler thrown in. I did write in Fortran, Plan and a couple of other languages from time to time though.I recall there was always a debate as to whether programming was an art or a science.Bet the lot of us could still beat the script kiddies if it came to using resources efficiently though :-D Graham Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
net-traveller Posted March 22, 2007 Author Share Posted March 22, 2007 Yep - the programmers/coders of today don't know the half of it. The strange thing is that nothing is new under the sun and techniques which we had to use still have their place today, albeit for other reasons, but because the newbies have never meet them systems are larger than needs be and probably less efficient. The cost of equipment now is so much cheaper than then that the tendency is to spent money rather than look at the problem. But that's not just confined to computers it's all around us. Perhaps the environmental issues will bring it home. ;-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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