Today is FORTRAN’s 70th birthday; its reference manual “appeared in a glossy cover, handsomely printed, with the date October 15, 1956.” https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/FORTRAN/paper/p25-backus.pdf
(The actual software wasn’t released till the following year)
No longer fashionable but still, one of computer programming’s biggest success stories. I tip my hat.
@timbray I didn't realize it was that old. That I used Fortran 77 at university does now make a bit more sense. I thought it was just to differentiate from F90, but I see there were earlier versions, too!
@ericsfraga @tehstu @timbray When we talk about Fortran 66 or Fortran 77, we have to specify—for instance, Fortran 66 on the PDP-10, Burroughs, or other systems, or Fortran 77 on the VAX, Microsoft, CDC, or other platforms—as these were, in effect, distinct dialects, each with its own quirks and peculiarities.
@timbray
Still useful, too! At lastjob I handled an app that was still FORTRAN because that's where the libraries you need for that sort of astrophysics math still live.
@timbray I knew FORTRAN 77 decades ago. The fact that column offsets were important delimiters because of punch cards was quaint in a cool way.
IIRC
- Columns 1-5 were punch card number. Unused in the 1990s
- Column 6 was a continuation flag. If it was blank, it was a new line, but if it wasn’t then the statement from the previous line was continued on to this line
- Columns 7-75? Were the program statement
I think 76-80ish were some other reserved field. Maybe that was the punch card number and 1-5 was something else. It also was unused in the 1990s
@timbray Come along and Celebrate in Manchester, UK on 1 Dec !
🎂🍾
@timbray great quote from John Backus:
«In other words, the next revolution in programming will take place only when both of the following requirements have been met: (a) a new kind of programming language, far more powerful than those of today, has been developed; and (b) a technique has been found for executing its programs at not much greater cost than that of today's programs.»
Oct 15, 2026, 5:14 PM@timbray i mean, one of about 2 languages from the 1950s still in use, and although in modified form, still recognisable. (the other is LISP)
@timbray summer of 86, I had my first paying "programming" job (at SAIC), reading and adding comments to old FORTRAN flight simulator code and running incremental tape backups. Sometimes I also got to "mac up" drawings and charts on the one Macintosh they'd just bought.
@timbray I had to delete FORTRAN from my CV because agents kept calling me about FORTRAN gigs.
@timbray Happy Birthday FORTRAN!
I first learned it in 1973 as an intern, where it ran the IBM 1800 control system for a giant paper machine at International Paper Co.
Out of school, I landed my first job in 1971 by knowing Fortran II and able to use it on an IBM 1100. Then skipped to DEC PDP’s, DG Nova’s, and HP 1000’s, all running FORTRAN 4, 4x, or 77. At that point in 1984, I switched to C.
Needless to say, FORTRAN was the basis for a long career.
I considered learning FORTRAN for a while when considering a thesis using the massive earth system models at one of the big national labs.
It was generally felt that learning the language did not add any time to learning the problem and the model. And nobody was going to port the code because a), tested, and b) mostly in FORTRANS sweet spot anyway. @timbray
@timbray No longer fashionable? In my bubble this is the hottest sh*t right now, I swear.... oh, sorry, I meant Forth! Insert Homer Simpson dissapearing in the bush :)
@timbray Common blocks!
Oct 15, 2026, 7:49 PMLearned FORTRAN on punch cards at a Michigan Tech University summer camp in Houghton.
A decade later, the introductory programming class at the University of Michigan was still FORTRAN on punch cards, so I didn't take it and thus skipped over a generation of computing to microcomputers and then Unix systems.
Oct 15, 2026, 7:59 PM@timbray FORTRAN was a required course when I studied Physics at Berkeley in the 80s and 90s.
@evan Might possibly still be. A lot of the core libraries that various flavors of physics use are huge pools of FORTRAN.
Oct 15, 2026, 8:07 PM@timbray FORTRAN paid my rent from the late 1980's to the early 1990's.
Oct 15, 2026, 8:16 PM@timbray FORTRAN (and a remote job operator working one weekend) set the course for my life 🤣
If not for the fact that a 13 year old kid could snarf unlimited use of WATFIV at York U's IBM 360/168, I expect I would have had a vastly different career path!
I eventually got busted for stealing computer time and was punished with a full access APL account.
Oct 15, 2026, 8:23 PM@timbray good ol' FORTRAN, Bender would say
@timbray I first encountered Fortran when it was 21 years old and I was 20. I still use it today.
@timbray I'm glad you didn't write a longer piece - else I'd have to look for the continuation holes in column six.
@timbray Those were the days.
Oct 15, 2026, 8:49 PMFORTRAN is 70.0000 years old. IORTRAN is 70. ;)
@timbray @danbricklin Wrote a corporate email program in FORTRAN in 1985 when our VAX administrator wouldn’t order a C compiler for the machine. I used C on IBM PC & Unix computers but FORTRAN on VAX. As soon as I started the FORTRAN program the syntax came right back from the first programs I wrote in engineering school in the 1960’s. With the help of VMS system calls I could do everything I did in C on the other computers 🙂
Oct 15, 2026, 9:08 PM@timbray 70 years of FORTRAN! Twas my first programming 1980 in high school. We would mark up punch cards and once a week drive to the one school that had an IBM 1130. Lucky to get one run to debug and fix for next week.
Later as a grad student in Geology I wrote a gravity anomoly simulation program in MacFORTRAN https://cogdogblog.com/2003/10/legacy-of/
WRITE (6,7)
7 FORMAT(21H HELLO, WORLD I AM 70)
STOP
END
@timbray my third year CS project at uni in 1976 was to write an emulator for an imaginary assembly code language that my supervisor was writing a book about - hated it, character manipulation was horrible
@timbray I taught FORTRAN at the university level in the 1970s. It was the standard language for Intro to Programming courses at the time.
@timbray mid 80’s learning F77 the going rate for work on FORTRAN was $500/hr. A terse language to work with. Used primarily on translation and manipulation of large geographic data sets. Code lasts forever as shown.
@timbray
Punch cards forever!
@timbray Weeelllll… nuclear scientists still use it!😹 (I know a few 😉)
Oct 15, 2026, 9:57 PM@timbray I still have the original FORTRAN IV reference handbook in the shell. Good enough for me - and an amazed laugh at the chapter about punch card format.
@timbray
I started using FORTRAN in 1961. Found and fixed a bug in the compiler, probably 1962. Beginning of a long mostly love affair with computers.
@timbray
I am amazed to find out that I am older than FORTRAN by a few months. I had no idea. 🤗
Oct 15, 2026, 11:18 PM@timbray Fortran and Pascal were the first 2 languages I learned way back when. That being said, I can't say that I could write a single line of either way this point
@timbray
Some additional info on the history of Fortran.