GOD is REAL unless declared INTEGER

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.