10 ms·

My father was a physicist. He learned to program in FORTRAN in the university in the 70's. Decades later I, still a teenager, asked him something like this: "D

My father was a physicist. He learned to program in FORTRAN in the university in the 70's. Decades later I, still a teenager, asked him something like this: "Dad, you were a FORTRAN programmer and physicist in the 70's, you could be a very well paid developer anywhere in the developed world... why didn't you?"; he answered me: "I didn't thought this thing about computers would go too far."

jimt1234 4y ago
My grandpa told me the same thing; he didn't think computers were gonna last. Not sure of exact time, but I think it was late-60s-to-early-70s; Gramps was a business professor at a major university in the Midwest. A team of math nerds started working on this new thing called a "computer". He said it was almost the size of a basketball gymnasium, it took weeks to get the thing set up, and was always breaking. In the end, it could only do simple calculations. He said the university viewed the project as pretty much a failure. So, Gramps, the futurist, told all his business students not to get involved with computers, there was no future in them. Good job, Gramps. He later told me his big hope was that none of his students listened to a word he said. LOL
pastage 4y ago
One have to understand the social factors as well. It was womens job in the beginning, the stigma of being seen as a female computers was most probably what made it unattractive and tediuos to many men at the time. Many highly placed engineering bosses in programming were women for a long time because those where the people who had experience. See Margret Hamilton of Apollo, and also some of the pioneers in cellphone "software".
hilbert42 4y ago
"Dad, you were a FORTRAN programmer and physicist in the 70's, you could be a very well paid developer anywhere in the developed world... why didn't you?"..." I'd suggest there is likely another reason, and if your father didn't actively think about it he probably understood it subliminally. Back then, programming was part of mathematics at many universities and, like it or not, everyone doing science and engineering had to study the subject—and for many universities that was Fortran. Fortran was essential part of the background culture: if one was doing mathematics or any of the physical sciences, Fortran was just there—thus, one didn't see it as special or exceptional. I had no option but to study it but I didn't see that as an imposition—diehards like me were regularly chucked out of the punch card room by the university security guards last thing at night when the joint closed. Moreover, at my university the Fortran lecturer also wrote the Fortran textbook (well, the ones we used at least), so there was no leniency or excuse: Introduction to FORTRAN IV programming using the watfor compiler - 1968 & 1971 and Basic FORTRAN IV programming (version IBM 360), 1969—by John M Blatt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Blatt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Blatt. As I found out later there were better textbooks on the subject and Blatt was a didactic forceful character without much charisma, so his lectures were somewhat painful. However, comic relief was not that infrequent. We had Fortran lectures in a large hall which had an upper circle like a picture theater, a certain fraternity would frequent the circle and aim paper airplanes at him when he was facing the blackboard much to his chagrin. No, I wasn't one of the guilty but I fully enjoyed the spectacle.
jmfldn 4y ago
Ditto more or less. Dad was a mechanical engineering academic. Learned fortran programming in the late 1960s on punch cards.
nervousvarun 4y ago
We probably are close to the same age. My dad was an engineer who also learned to program FORTRAN in the 70's. When I asked him a similar question his reply was (quotes are paraphrased): "It was way too tedious to do. You'd spend hours getting the cards just right. We used to put them in a shoebox and mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on the way to the lab. Then you'd wait until the next day to get your results. If you had a mistake you'd repeat the whole process". Basically it was considered tedious, grunt work in his opinion (at the time...he later of course has come to understand the importance).
- smcameron 4y ago
  I remember going off to college in 1986, and thinking I might major in computer science, and my dad told me, "anyone can learn to program computers, you might be better off with EE." To be fair, at the time, anyone could learn to program computers (and it's probably still true) -- my dad was doing it, and his major was chemistry -- and really, anyone that's really good at programming computers is necessarily self-taught to a great extent. You just don't become a great programmer by dint of tutoring. Anyway, I stayed in EE for a year, then switched my major to computer science with a minor in EE, and no regrets.
- brailsafe 4y ago
  It's still tedious grunt work
- marcodiego 4y ago
  This is something my father told me too. He said he spent some time writing the code on paper, thinking a lot about it; then when he was somewhat sure about what he had written it was time to punch the cards. He used to leave the batch on Friday and went back on Monday to ask the "computer operator" about results and sometimes the result was "syntax error on line 1."
- lambdasquirrel 4y ago
  > "I didn't thought this thing about computers would go too far." I almost didn't major in Computer Science because in the late 90s, there were so many negative articles in the New York Times, vis-a-vis software. People don't remember it now, but the media and the culture were utterly hostile towards us, and loved to say our jobs were going to India, that everything there was to know about Computer Science could be studied in railyard switching, in existing abstract math textbooks, etc. By a combination of luck, and my dad's insistence, I ended up at Carnegie Mellon, and while I was there, I saw what folks at Google were doing, and I thought to myself, no, this stuff is hard, and this is just going to be the beginning. > "It was way too tedious to do. You'd spend hours getting the cards just right. We used to put them in a shoebox and mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on the way to the lab. Then you'd wait until the next day to get your results. If you had a mistake you'd repeat the whole process" Even what came after that, e.g. in C / C++ was considerably tedious compared to what we do today. Folks sometimes had to do objdumps of compiled binaries to debug what was going on. We had to get coredumps, load them up, and try to determine what memory error had caused things to crash (this is an entire class of problems that doesn't exist today). You used to legit need that CS degree in order to code in your day-to-day because you had to understand the function stack, the network stack, basic syscalls like wait and poll, etc. It was a lot of work, for relatively little product, and I think part of the reason why software is paid more today is in part because of 1. faster processing speeds and 2. better tooling and automation, and higher-level programming languages – all of which were enabled in part by cheaper / faster CPU speeds (e.g. people don't have to care about how slow Python is – you can optimize it after you find product-market-fit), and 3. a better understanding of how software should be developed, at all levels of management.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
It was very niche. My dad (also early FORTRAN programmer) graduated in the very first undergrad CS class at UCLA, around '69 or `70. I think very few universities had a CS course at that time.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  It looks like the first CS department was at Purdue (wasn't expecting that); they introduce a CS degree program in `67. UNC was another early adopter.
  - govg 4y ago
    What is interesting is that the IITs in India (the first 5 at least) were setup a decade prior (late 50s), and some had very heavy support from American and European universities while setting up. So much so that IIT Kanpur actually had a CS department that started in 1963!
sunjester 4y ago
I love this so much.
emmelaich 4y ago
What is forgotten sometimes is that there was (for men) a severe prejudice about working with a keyboard. The image pre-1985 or so was that keyboards were almost exclusively associated with typing pools. Those typing pools were were as far as I know 100% female. To be honest, this prejudice still exists. I heard a C-suite exec mocking "those guys with the ticky-tacky machines".
pjdemers 4y ago
As recently as the early 90's, making a lifetime career out of software development was considered impossible. When I was starting out in the late 80's all the developers were taking classes or had a side business, with the goal getting out of "programming" before it was too late. Even those who wanted to stay in the industry took every opportunity to talk directly with clients so they could get into sales or marketing.
suzzer99 4y ago
My uncle worked for Folgers coffee in the 60s as a general office clerk. They gave everyone some kind of test designed to see if you had aptitude for programming. He scored high, so they asked him if he wanted to learn COBOL, and his career was born.
keithnz 4y ago
my father who was a research physicist from the 70s+ lamented at his colleagues who got too distracted with programming their computers! For me it was great, I got to grow up with computers and electronics and a bunch of adults who loved these things!

jimt1234 4y ago

My grandpa told me the same thing; he didn't think computers were gonna last. Not sure of exact time, but I think it was late-60s-to-early-70s; Gramps was a business professor at a major university in the Midwest. A team of math nerds started working on this new thing called a "computer". He said it was almost the size of a basketball gymnasium, it took weeks to get the thing set up, and was always breaking. In the end, it could only do simple calculations. He said the university viewed the project as pretty much a failure. So, Gramps, the futurist, told all his business students not to get involved with computers, there was no future in them. Good job, Gramps. He later told me his big hope was that none of his students listened to a word he said. LOL

pastage 4y ago

One have to understand the social factors as well. It was womens job in the beginning, the stigma of being seen as a female computers was most probably what made it unattractive and tediuos to many men at the time. Many highly placed engineering bosses in programming were women for a long time because those where the people who had experience. See Margret Hamilton of Apollo, and also some of the pioneers in cellphone "software".

hilbert42 4y ago

"Dad, you were a FORTRAN programmer and physicist in the 70's, you could be a very well paid developer anywhere in the developed world... why didn't you?"..." I'd suggest there is likely another reason, and if your father didn't actively think about it he probably understood it subliminally. Back then, programming was part of mathematics at many universities and, like it or not, everyone doing science and engineering had to study the subject—and for many universities that was Fortran. Fortran was essential part of the background culture: if one was doing mathematics or any of the physical sciences, Fortran was just there—thus, one didn't see it as special or exceptional. I had no option but to study it but I didn't see that as an imposition—diehards like me were regularly chucked out of the punch card room by the university security guards last thing at night when the joint closed. Moreover, at my university the Fortran lecturer also wrote the Fortran textbook (well, the ones we used at least), so there was no leniency or excuse: Introduction to FORTRAN IV programming using the watfor compiler - 1968 & 1971 and Basic FORTRAN IV programming (version IBM 360), 1969—by John M Blatt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Blatt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Blatt. As I found out later there were better textbooks on the subject and Blatt was a didactic forceful character without much charisma, so his lectures were somewhat painful. However, comic relief was not that infrequent. We had Fortran lectures in a large hall which had an upper circle like a picture theater, a certain fraternity would frequent the circle and aim paper airplanes at him when he was facing the blackboard much to his chagrin. No, I wasn't one of the guilty but I fully enjoyed the spectacle.

jmfldn 4y ago

Ditto more or less. Dad was a mechanical engineering academic. Learned fortran programming in the late 1960s on punch cards.

nervousvarun 4y ago

We probably are close to the same age. My dad was an engineer who also learned to program FORTRAN in the 70's. When I asked him a similar question his reply was (quotes are paraphrased): "It was way too tedious to do. You'd spend hours getting the cards just right. We used to put them in a shoebox and mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on the way to the lab. Then you'd wait until the next day to get your results. If you had a mistake you'd repeat the whole process". Basically it was considered tedious, grunt work in his opinion (at the time...he later of course has come to understand the importance).

smcameron 4y ago
I remember going off to college in 1986, and thinking I might major in computer science, and my dad told me, "anyone can learn to program computers, you might be better off with EE." To be fair, at the time, anyone could learn to program computers (and it's probably still true) -- my dad was doing it, and his major was chemistry -- and really, anyone that's really good at programming computers is necessarily self-taught to a great extent. You just don't become a great programmer by dint of tutoring. Anyway, I stayed in EE for a year, then switched my major to computer science with a minor in EE, and no regrets.
brailsafe 4y ago
It's still tedious grunt work
marcodiego 4y ago
This is something my father told me too. He said he spent some time writing the code on paper, thinking a lot about it; then when he was somewhat sure about what he had written it was time to punch the cards. He used to leave the batch on Friday and went back on Monday to ask the "computer operator" about results and sometimes the result was "syntax error on line 1."
lambdasquirrel 4y ago
> "I didn't thought this thing about computers would go too far." I almost didn't major in Computer Science because in the late 90s, there were so many negative articles in the New York Times, vis-a-vis software. People don't remember it now, but the media and the culture were utterly hostile towards us, and loved to say our jobs were going to India, that everything there was to know about Computer Science could be studied in railyard switching, in existing abstract math textbooks, etc. By a combination of luck, and my dad's insistence, I ended up at Carnegie Mellon, and while I was there, I saw what folks at Google were doing, and I thought to myself, no, this stuff is hard, and this is just going to be the beginning. > "It was way too tedious to do. You'd spend hours getting the cards just right. We used to put them in a shoebox and mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on the way to the lab. Then you'd wait until the next day to get your results. If you had a mistake you'd repeat the whole process" Even what came after that, e.g. in C / C++ was considerably tedious compared to what we do today. Folks sometimes had to do objdumps of compiled binaries to debug what was going on. We had to get coredumps, load them up, and try to determine what memory error had caused things to crash (this is an entire class of problems that doesn't exist today). You used to legit need that CS degree in order to code in your day-to-day because you had to understand the function stack, the network stack, basic syscalls like wait and poll, etc. It was a lot of work, for relatively little product, and I think part of the reason why software is paid more today is in part because of 1. faster processing speeds and 2. better tooling and automation, and higher-level programming languages – all of which were enabled in part by cheaper / faster CPU speeds (e.g. people don't have to care about how slow Python is – you can optimize it after you find product-market-fit), and 3. a better understanding of how software should be developed, at all levels of management.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

It was very niche. My dad (also early FORTRAN programmer) graduated in the very first undergrad CS class at UCLA, around '69 or `70. I think very few universities had a CS course at that time.

insane_dreamer 4y ago
It looks like the first CS department was at Purdue (wasn't expecting that); they introduce a CS degree program in `67. UNC was another early adopter.
- govg 4y ago
  What is interesting is that the IITs in India (the first 5 at least) were setup a decade prior (late 50s), and some had very heavy support from American and European universities while setting up. So much so that IIT Kanpur actually had a CS department that started in 1963!

sunjester 4y ago

I love this so much.

emmelaich 4y ago

What is forgotten sometimes is that there was (for men) a severe prejudice about working with a keyboard. The image pre-1985 or so was that keyboards were almost exclusively associated with typing pools. Those typing pools were were as far as I know 100% female. To be honest, this prejudice still exists. I heard a C-suite exec mocking "those guys with the ticky-tacky machines".

pjdemers 4y ago

As recently as the early 90's, making a lifetime career out of software development was considered impossible. When I was starting out in the late 80's all the developers were taking classes or had a side business, with the goal getting out of "programming" before it was too late. Even those who wanted to stay in the industry took every opportunity to talk directly with clients so they could get into sales or marketing.

suzzer99 4y ago

My uncle worked for Folgers coffee in the 60s as a general office clerk. They gave everyone some kind of test designed to see if you had aptitude for programming. He scored high, so they asked him if he wanted to learn COBOL, and his career was born.

keithnz 4y ago

my father who was a research physicist from the 70s+ lamented at his colleagues who got too distracted with programming their computers! For me it was great, I got to grow up with computers and electronics and a bunch of adults who loved these things!