Old timers reminiscing about Fortran

[jedishrfu]

<Moderator's note: This thread is a spinoff from https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/need-help-with-fortran-compiler-errors.985749/>

There's a lot of Fortran dummies on PF and they know who they are! :-)

Spoiler: For some of us...

it was the first language we learned and it has evolved faster than us.

 

[hutchphd]

But is was not for dummies in the watfor and watfiv days. It took heroic people to punch cards and hurl ⚒ themselves repeatedly on the alter of the batch job. We stood amid piles of fanfold paper with bloodshot eyes clutching sacred sources of caffeine. Lord I hated it but the results were occasionally worth it. Maybe.

 

[jedishrfu]

I once was a GE computer courier and I remember dropping someone's card deck in a puddle as my cart hit a bump and flipped the contents onto the wet ground. He was a very sad programmer that day but he was smart enough to always have a backup that he begged me to guard with my life.

Another time, while driving to the GE main plant, the suburban backdoors popped open and an open box of fanfold paper started wafting through the air and out the back. What a wonderful sight, a truck with a kite's tail going 60 mph down the highway.

As a newly minted programmer, my boss came to me with a sad and tragic problem. An I/O clerk dropped a tray of newly written FORTRAN source code and the programmer went home sick when he saw the mess. I was to put Humpty-dumpty back together again.

Fortunately, the programmer had marked the deck with several diagonal lines and the IO clerk was smart enough to scoop up the deck preserving most of its order. I had to reorder according to the lines, print it out and verify that things looked good before sending it into be compiled again as a final check.

 

[hutchphd]

The problem with the diagonal lines of course was revisions to the code. I had forgotten about that safeguard...as I recall I had several colors running in stripes as my thesis code evolved. Happilly I got good online storage and a terminal halfway through!

 

[anorlunda]

Another time, while driving to the GE main plant, the suburban backdoors popped open

I know that stretch of road. On another day, the door of an armored car popped open and a bag of money fell out. Someone turned it into police. The local radio station picked up the story. Soon everyone in town knew the story except the armored car company. The company had all their employees out searching the streets, and not listening to the radio. The residents of Schenectady were much amused seeing those trucks search because they knew where the money was.

 

[jedishrfu]

We had one terminal for 9 programmers. To get more, we set up a microfiche viewer and a punch card box to resemble a terminal and our boss cracked and got another one, just one. It was hard in those days to get anything to make your job easier.

Another time, I was on the terminal and this other zombie programmer sat in my chair eating my Cheez-its realizing I'd get off quick to rescue them from the zombie apocalypse before that was a thing. There were many geeky individuals doing programming in those days. (The WarGames movie captures those times pretty well).

 

[hutchphd]

At the time I developed an empirical theory that the computer (IBM 370 maybe?) actually functioned by draining the mental energy of all those within proximity, sort of like the plant in the "Little Shop of Horrors". Feeed meee Feed meee. I think with time and progress the processors use far less of surrounding intellect. I have far less to donate.

 

[Klystron]

Since we have turned this thread to "old programmers' story hour":

I learned to program professionally in rather cool offices embedded within the Unitary Plan wind tunnels, literally surrounded by these behemoths (see pic). One day I was transiting from the icy cold computer room in a parka to our office holding stacks of folded printer readouts for 3 of 4 programmers when the 11x11' Transonic tunnel switched on. I swear the lights flickered and our HVAC system went insane for a moment. I stumbled, a strong wind blew computer paper everywhere. Apologies, blushes, weak excuses ensued.

Thinking I was clowning, the other male programmer retrieved his printouts from the computer room, pretended to trip and spewed his pile of slippery printer paper across the slick tiles. The look on his face was priceless as he slipped on the printouts and nearly turned a cartwheel in the air while clutching the remains of the latest CFD results.

We became friendly after that experience. I showed him how to shop for clothes in the new fashion mall and suggested he change his outfit each day even if he wore the exact same dull style every day everywhere. You must be a nerd when an USAF veteran gives you clothing tips.

The Unitary Plan was declared a national monument that year and I believe the Cupertino fashion mall is now million dollar condominiums.

 

[anorlunda]

Old programmer tall tales are a frequent and popular topic on PF.

Once at TRW in Texas, I saw a paper tape being punched by one computer. It slithered across the floor and was being read by a second computer 20 meters away. I asked about it. The answer was, "We are doing a real time demo of controlling all the traffic lights in Toronto. Be careful not to step on that paper tape."

 

[jedishrfu]

At the time I developed an empirical theory that the computer (IBM 370 maybe?) actually functioned by draining the mental energy of all those within proximity, sort of like the plant in the "Little Shop of Horrors". Feeed meee Feed meee. I think with time and progress the processors use far less of surrounding intellect. I have far less to donate.

I worked for IBM And I can attest to it or rather those more senior folks with grand visions of how things should be done having forgotten what it was like in the trenches, draining your mental capacity.

 

[Jonathan Scott]

I still work for IBM, providing technical support (and occasional enhancements) for old mainframe software. One of the products I currently look after is IBM's VS Fortran compiler (which is basically at Fortran 77 level and was last updated in about 1993). I used Fortran at college in 1974 so I didn't need to update my brain very much to catch up.

 

[DaveE]

You should give a trigger warning, LOL. I still have a bit of PTSD; Fortran reminds me of making punch cards, handing them over to a computer center and waiting until the next morning to finding out I made a typo somewhere! I haven't used it since, not that that's the fault of the language, mind you. It's guilt by association, I guess.

 

[berkeman]

As a newly minted programmer, my boss came to me with a sad and tragic problem. An I/O clerk dropped a tray of newly written FORTRAN source code and the programmer went home sick when he saw the mess. I was to put Humpty-dumpty back together again.

Fortunately, the programmer had marked the deck with several diagonal lines and the IO clerk was smart enough to scoop up the deck preserving most of its order. I had to reorder according to the lines, print it out and verify that things looked good before sending it into be compiled again as a final check.

I still remember riding my bicycle across campus near the end of the semester where I first learned to program in Fortran. I had the box of punched cards with my final project carefully strapped to the back rack of my bicycle to take it to the computer center for input (there were card punch machines at several locations across campus, including in our dorms). I kept saying, "Please don't crash, please don't drop the box..."

 

[hutchphd]

I want to know who is responsible for this new thread title...And GET OFF MY LAWN

 

[jedishrfu]

Kind of reminiscent of the scene from The Paper Chase when one student held his carefully crafted notes out of the dorm window and then the unthinkable the wind caught his parcel, he lost his grip and the notes wafted downward.



Skip to 2:20 for the action

 

[jedishrfu]

I want to know who is responsible for this new thread title...And GET OFF MY LAWN

Its a boomer joke, Mr Wilson. (Dennis the Menace)

 

[Astronuc]

I used Fortran77 because the company where I worked had legacy code written in the 1970s and 1980s, and the senior management preferred the old language. The sponsor eventually had it upgraded to modern Fortran.

Fortran was not the first language I used, but the fifth language, which I encountered at university.

First language I used was BASIC during Grade 6, ca. 1969. We used a punch teletype and phone-based modem to connect with some time-share computer somewhere.

During high school I encountered Fortran during a summer program at a local university, but we didn't do any programming at high school. We still used slide rules at the time, and only in Grade 11 did I see the first electronic calculator.

During my first few years at university (mid 1970s), I took one programming course, but instead of Fortran, we learned Pascal, PL/C (a version of PL/1, IIRC) and APL. I believe the expectation was for us to be flexible. We did use Fortran for engineering courses, and we used punch cards until they started getting terminals. I used to put rubberbands around the card deck, or if decks were large, we have a cardboard boxes/trays with lids to be sure they didn't spill.

At university, I used a calculator more than computer. I believe the progression was TI SR-51, TI-58C, and ultimately HP-41CX, which I still use! Upper level and graduate school engineering courses used Fortran (1980s).

More recently (2012-2014), I've used C++, which I find much more cumbersome than Fortran, which I prefer. In my experience, C++ was hyped, and I didn't see a benefit with object-oriented language, especially when some others keep changing to the underlying (upstream) architecture making the downstream objects useless.

 

[Astronuc]

Kind of reminiscent of the scene from The Paper Chase when one student held his carefully crafted notes out of the dorm window and then the unthinkable the wind caught his parcel, he lost his grip and the notes wafted downward.

Great movie!

 

[Dr Transport]

I programmed it in graduate school for my dissertation, only because my advisor didn't know any programming other than F77. I've been dabbling in it ever since, industry and government both use it extensively.
I had to teach a software engineer last week what to look for while we were tracing codes.

 

[jedishrfu]

Some of my favorite Fortran projects were government jobs ie personal ones:

- general purpose drawing program for the calcomp pen plotter disguised as a floor plan drawing program where there was a simple drawing language for describing shapes like desks, chairs and filing cabinets. You could annotate shapes with text and rotate the shape anyway you wanted and you could rotate groups of shapes one layer only.

- textbased othello game with learning capability. I felt proud when I saw I had written mine before one got published in Byte magazine and it didn’t learn. The learning was primitive, the was scanned valid moves were found, and the move where gameplay said was a winning move via stat counts from prior games was selected. There were some heuristics as well ie moves you should never make in case they got on the list.

- textbased star trek multi player game. It used a shared random file where space was allocated to individual starships before there was chat. Starship captains could send messages between them and starbases. A mapping utility created the gaming field with stars, ships and stellar phenomena.

Starships had different designs and a schematic as to how dilithium crystals worked. I used the schematic to do random damage to some crystal either via overload from an external attack or some internal malfunction. The schematic indicated whether shields, life support, weapons were affected and how percentage wise. Displays were drawn on screen with text.

It was inspired by the BASIC version of star trek and a screen based version of Battleship with missions thrown in. It never got completely finished as I ran up against the Monty haul problem ie more loot for more adventure to grab more things to exchange for more loot. I wanted a more story based game design but you only do so much with government work while working in industry under a watchful boss who while okay as a boss didn’t really know what you were doing.

They were all written in Honeywell Fortran-Y dialect circa 1974-1984 on a GCOS Timesharing system. The Fortran featured the character data type Which used extensively. I still have the code around somewhere.