Bob Hughes wrote:
> 
> Was talking just last weekend about Fortran with my dad and a friend of
> his. They used it back in the '60s with those punch cards etc. First I've
> heard he almost did programming back then, citing it to be similar to flow
> charting. He was a finance manager and later became manager of the
> internationl space station at Boeing before retiring.
> I had visited his workplace in Florida as a kid and was shown the computer
> room, what a monstrosity of archaic machines, although at the time it was
> like a peek into the future for me. I did a bit of Fortran in a computing
> class in high school circa '77. Strange typewriter-sized machine that used
> punchcards as input and had only a orange LED display to show plots of
> equations, formula, functions we gave it. We were apparently behind the
> times there I think.
> 

The funny thing is that my dad started his work at a computer center in
the 60's. He worked even with the Zuse-8 (?) one of the first computers
available. I remember when I visited him at work as a child (about 18
years ago) he was already programming in FORTRAN 77. It was ultra
modern! That's what's happen when a company gets so dominant that a
change is nearly impossible.

I cite an IBM mananger many many years ago:

"I don't know how the programming language of the future will look like
but what I know is that it will be called FORTRAN!"

I hope my kids won't be condemmed to work with Windows 2000 'til the end
of their days.


All the best,

Marc 
-- 
Marc Schimmler

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