[GreenKeys] Bletchley Park...FORTRAN

[amourdutigre]

I took a FORTRAN class the summer of 1980, and it was WAT IV I believe. Ran 
on punch cards.

The required things to be bought for the class (besides the text) were three 
cases of blank cards, a box of wide rubberbands and a little red wagon. Yes 
a wagon.

The text and cards make sense to the average person. The rubber bands and 
wagon made sense after the first two weeks of class  :-)

Best thing that I learned from that course was the value of the "job card", 
which was the first card of the stack. It let the computer administrators 
know who the program belonged to. I swiped my proffessor's card, copied it, 
and returned his (while he was at lunch).

So here is the story. The printer was a giant line printer that would print 
the entire line at once on greenbar. All 180 columns worth. The ribbon at 
the print center was worn out, and the folks that ran the place did not want 
to replace it until fall, so the kept increasing the strike pressure until 
it was at the maximum. One could take their printout and hold it to the 
light, and see that the letters were acutally punched through the paper.

Sooo, after one night of enjoying the company of a summer ladyfriend 
(remember, I was sixteen), I came up with this wonderful idea while... I 
wrote a continous do-loop that printed 180 lines down the page, and one line 
across every LS. When the paper came off of the platen, it fell apart into 
so much confetti...thirty pages worth of confetti to be exact.

I used my professor's job card for that program. He never figured out who 
did that...

I got an A in the course.

Those were the days (and nights)! FORTRAN by day, drinking, partying and the 
fair sex by night!

Best,

Joe Herdler

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Elmquist" <chrise at pobox.com>
To: "Craig Sawyers" <c.sawyers at tech-enterprise.com>
Cc: <greenkeys at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 6:30 AM
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] Bletchley Park...FORTRAN


> On Wednesday (03/04/2009 at 07:56AM -0000), Craig Sawyers wrote:
>> > FORTRAN.  What version is it up to these days?
>>
>> Ah, Fortran.  I used FORTRAN 66 (and later 77) and ALGOL 68 at 
>> university.
>> That kind of dates me.  And yes, I programmed using punch cards.  You 
>> used
>> to see folks walking around with huge trays of many hundreds of these 
>> things
>> on their way to computer reception.  The ICL machine had a 32k core 
>> store.
>> If you thought you needed more than 16k for your run you had to supply an
>> authorisation letter from your supervisor.
>>
>> Ah - happy days.  Not ;-)
>
> Wow...   ya.  That is a another huge difference in today's world where
> many shops have interactive access to these systems and you just telnet
> or ssh to them and edit, compile, debug right on the very system the
> job will run.
>
> FORTRAN is "up to" 95 I think in mainstream use now. Although 95 was a
> minor revision over 90 and I think many people still think in terms of
> FORTRAN90.  Lots of shops have their own preprocessing codes though too
> and I've heard of a big weather model that is coded in object oriented
> FORTRAN.
>
> This page,
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran
>
> talks about 2003 and 2008 revisions but I can't say I hear too many people
> talking about needing features from those revisions.  On the other hand,
> I'm not an apps guy--  I hang out in the guts of the machine and believe
> it is only important to run the operating system and apps are someone 
> else's
> problem :-)
>
> Chris
>
> ______________________________________________________________
> GreenKeys mailing list
> Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/greenkeys
> Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
> Post: mailto:GreenKeys at mailman.qth.net
>
> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
>