John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies

The New York Times ^ | March 20, 2007 | STEVE LOHR

[Tallguy]

I hated managing those stacks of keypunched cards...

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Those were the Days....I remember doing battle with paper tape....

[catman67]

I learned FORTRAN-2 for the IBM 7090. I don't believe that "DO loops" were invented until FORTRAN-4.

[Dilbert56]

Once, during a break in a Math class, a friend and I tried to program an algorithm from the class in FORTRAN. Unfortunately, we named our variable "A" or something silly like that. When our loop tested to see if it equaled 1 it never did. So the program just kept running until we hit the break key (and had burned a couple seconds of CPU). Of course we should have named the variable "I" or "J" so FORTRAN would treat it as an integer and it would equal 1 and not .9999999 or whatever. We changed the program to PL/I instead and it ran fine.

As for punch cards, my first daughter's birth announcement, circa 1983, went out on them. My client had an old 129 lying around. I typed up the vital stats and then hit the DUP key a couple dozen times.

[TexasRepublic]

A good APL programmer can write a program in one line, though nobody else will be able to read it.

That was the scariest language I ever had to learn! For matrix math it had elegance -- but special symbols and special keyboards, yuck! Whoever came up with that should have been shot. You are right about trying to read it -- I couldn't read my own code later! Gimme good old assembly to maintain instead of APL!

[null and void]

I first learned FORTRAN-4, with DO loops...

[TexasRepublic]

I too long ago took a course in Basic and disliked it for the disconnect between the code and what it was doing. Then I took a course in Fortran and liked it for its making me know what the code was doing.

Then you might have liked IBM 360 assembly language. I learned COBOL first, then assembly afterward. That's when I really understood what COBOL was doing. I told my instructor that I should have learned assembly first, to appreciate COBOL better. He said, "We didn't want to scare you"!

[jrp]

My first programming experience was Fortran 77 on punch cards in high school, circa 1980. RIP Mr. Backus.

[posterchild]

I first learned FORTRAN-4, with DO loops...

"When I started programming, we didn't have any of these sissy 'icons' and 'windows'... all we had were zeros and ones - and sometimes we didn't even have ones." - Scott Adams (Dilbert)

[Redleg Duke]

My first language was "FORGO", the forerunner of FORTRAN.

I feel old! :-)

[starlifter]

real men used ALGOL on a B-7700.

[Redleg Duke]

Don't feel bad. I brought in my old Post Versalog slide rule and none of my subordinates knew what it was!

[posterchild]

I remember buying an APL interpreter from some guy in Weed, CA. Might still have it somewhere but don't have a 5-1/4 floppy drive to load it on.
I feel fortunate my flirtations with assembly and machine code (PDP-11) were brief.

[shamusotoole]

Between Soap and Fortran there was Autocoder. IBM 1400 series as I recollect.

You created cliches and created your own language to unleash them in proper order.

For those who are too young to know... Old computers cannot be found today because they contained many precious metals in their works and were worth huge bucks as scrap, especially in the Carter Administration when Gold hit about $800.00 per oz.

Old innards were also a thing of beauty too, having been meticulously produced almost entirely by hand, homologous to a fine old watch.

[r9etb]

i hated fortran!

Not me -- it's a great language, and I think it's still the fastest one out there for heavy number crunching. It lacks some of the nicer aspects of object-oriented code, but speed .... in my line of work that's a big deal.

[null and void]

IF Dead
GOTO Heaven
END

[Brujo]

I had a small, dwindling supply. Just a handful left now.

Actually, seeing this thread and your comment about still writing on old cards provoked me to do a quick Google search. I found at least one company that still sells blank cards.

The Cardamation company advertises here blank cards at 2000 for $32. (They have a minimum order of $50 and I don't even want to think what the shipping would cost. :-)

Well, at least it's nice to know they're still available ...

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Somewhere I have a circular slide Rule....

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Yes...nice touch... thank you!

[decimon]

Then you might have liked IBM 360 assembly language.

I took a course in that as well. Got an A but I've never programmed in any language so I've forgotten it all. The teacher was an outre character who was the best comp. teacher I had. He left the school (Pace University) after one term for not being able to reach a contract agreement.