3 ms·

Fortran predates C by over a decade, and dozens of compilers existed for it by the mid-60s. Much of that legacy code is still in use to this day in scientific c

Fortran predates C by over a decade, and dozens of compilers existed for it by the mid-60s. Much of that legacy code is still in use to this day in scientific computing. One example: John Pople won his Nobel prize for work he did (and implemented in Fortran) in computational chemistry - the prize was delayed until '98 but he did the work in the 60s. The software he commercialized it into, Gaussian, still gets releases to this day and remains one of the most popular computational chemistry packages. It's really dependent on which field you're in. Not all scientific computing requires a beefy computer, but for a very long time it (and I guess LISP) dominated scientific computing. That said, I think it's a very good point to bring up the network effect of using C - if I need to hire a developer in 1985, it's probably easier to find someone with industry (not academic) experience who knows C than it is to find someone who knows Fortran. I do kinda prefer Fortran to C though, it's so much cleaner to do math in. Maybe somewhere there's an alternate universe where IBM invented C and Bell invented Fortran to win the popularity war.

jacquesm 3y ago
I tried to get access to FORTRAN and it was just way too expensive and required machines that I would not have been able to get close to. C ran on anything from Atari STs, IBM PCs, Amiga's and any other machine that an ordinary person could get their hands on. The other mainstream language at the time was BASIC, comparable to the way PHP is viewed today by many. And with the advent of the 32 bit x86 era GCC and djgpp as well as early Linux systems really unlocked a lot of power. Before then you'd have to have access to a VAX or a fancy workstation to get that kind of performance out of PC hardware. It's funny how long it took for the 386 to become fully operational, many years after it was launched you had to jump through all kinds of hoops to be able to use the system properly, whereas on a 68K based system costing a tiny fraction that was considered completely normal.
- StableAlkyne 3y ago
  My perspective is a bit biased by scientific computing, I do more of that than enterprise stuff (and Python has been fine for personal use). It's cool to see the perspective of someone who was around for the early stages of it though. How did people see Fortran back then - nowadays it's seen as outdated but fast, but was it seen as interesting, and what drove you to seek it out? Other side question if it's okay, I keep seeing references to VAXen around historical documents and usenet posts from the 80s and 90s, what made them special compared to other hardware you had back then?
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    My one experience with FORTRAN was when working for a big dutch architect who made spaceframes, I built their cad system and a colleague built the finite element analysis module based on an existing library. We agreed on a common format and happily exchanged files with coordinates, wall thicknesses and information about the materials the structure was made out of and forces in one direction and a file with displacements in the other. It worked like a charm (combined C and FORTRAN). I thought it was quite readable, it felt a bit archaic but on the whole not more archaic than COBOL which I had also worked with. The reason that library existed in FORTRAN was that it had a native 'vector' type and allowed for decent optimization on the proper hardware (ie: multiply and accumulate) which we did not have. But the library had been validated and was approved for civil engineering purposes, porting it over would have been a ton of work and would not have served any purpose, besides it would have required recertification. As for VAXen: A VAX 11/780 is a 32 bit minicomputer, something the size of a large fridge (though later there were also smaller ones and today you could probably stick one on a business card). It had a - for the time - a relatively large amount of memory, and was a timesharing system, in other words, multiple people used the same computer via terminals. They weren't special per se other than that a whole raft of programmers from those days cut their teeth on them either because they came across them in universities or because they worked with them professionally. They were 'affordable' in the sense that you did not need to be a multinational or a bank in order to buy one, think a few hundred thousand $ (which was still quite a fortune back then). I had occasional access to one through the uni account of a friend, but never did any serious work with them. The first powerful machine I got my hands on was the Atari ST, which had a 68K chip in it and allowed the connection of a hard drive. Together those two things really boosted my capabilities, suddenly I had access to a whole 512K of RAM (later 1M) and some serious compute. Compared to a time shared VAX it was much better, though the VAX had more raw power. Concurrent to that I programmed on mainframes for a bank for about a year or so, as well as on the BBC Micro computer (6502 based) and the Dragon 32 (a UK based Color Computer clone). Fun times. Computing back then was both more and less accessible than it is today. More because the machines were so much simpler, less because you didn't have the internet at your disposal to look stuff up.
- mcguire 3y ago
  There was a freely available FORTRAN on the Fred Fish Amiga disks in the late 80s. It came with a weird license---free for everything, but it couldn't be used for military or military-related things. The 386 was hampered by backwards compatibility with the weird memory architecture for the 286 and 8086, IIRC. 68Ks were just soooo much easier.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Oh cool, I never knew that. 386 flat mode was easy enough, but only djgpp unlocked that properly, everything else was a hodgepodge of the weirdest memory models. I remember making a bootloader for my own OS using TurboC that somehow had to fish four files from a minix based filesystem and dump them in memory at certain addresses and then switch to flat mode and start executing the kernel which would then initialize the system properly. That was some really weird mixed mode voodoo to switch back and forth between protected mode and real mode to be able to both use BIOS calls to fetch blocks from disk and to be able to park the data in the right spots in contiguous memory. Very tricky stuff to get right, it took me forever before I had the first indication that something was executing after the inevitable hail Mary jump to the first instruction in the loaded kernel. But I got it to work. I actually had a guitar footpedal hooked to the reset button because it took me too many dives under the desk to recover from a crash. That was a very slow development cycle without any chance of debugging. At some point I had 8 leds hooked up to the printer port to use some 'out' opcodes to tell me where I had gotten to in the code. Poor mans emulator :)
mcguire 3y ago
FORTRAN didn't officially grow a program stack until FORTRAN 90 (?), although I'm told some of the earlier FORTRAN 77-era compilers supported it. I remember meeting people who could not wrap their heads around the idea that function parameters weren't all passed by reference. The idea of recursion would have caused them to detonate.

jacquesm 3y ago

I tried to get access to FORTRAN and it was just way too expensive and required machines that I would not have been able to get close to. C ran on anything from Atari STs, IBM PCs, Amiga's and any other machine that an ordinary person could get their hands on. The other mainstream language at the time was BASIC, comparable to the way PHP is viewed today by many. And with the advent of the 32 bit x86 era GCC and djgpp as well as early Linux systems really unlocked a lot of power. Before then you'd have to have access to a VAX or a fancy workstation to get that kind of performance out of PC hardware. It's funny how long it took for the 386 to become fully operational, many years after it was launched you had to jump through all kinds of hoops to be able to use the system properly, whereas on a 68K based system costing a tiny fraction that was considered completely normal.

StableAlkyne 3y ago
My perspective is a bit biased by scientific computing, I do more of that than enterprise stuff (and Python has been fine for personal use). It's cool to see the perspective of someone who was around for the early stages of it though. How did people see Fortran back then - nowadays it's seen as outdated but fast, but was it seen as interesting, and what drove you to seek it out? Other side question if it's okay, I keep seeing references to VAXen around historical documents and usenet posts from the 80s and 90s, what made them special compared to other hardware you had back then?
- jacquesm 3y ago
  My one experience with FORTRAN was when working for a big dutch architect who made spaceframes, I built their cad system and a colleague built the finite element analysis module based on an existing library. We agreed on a common format and happily exchanged files with coordinates, wall thicknesses and information about the materials the structure was made out of and forces in one direction and a file with displacements in the other. It worked like a charm (combined C and FORTRAN). I thought it was quite readable, it felt a bit archaic but on the whole not more archaic than COBOL which I had also worked with. The reason that library existed in FORTRAN was that it had a native 'vector' type and allowed for decent optimization on the proper hardware (ie: multiply and accumulate) which we did not have. But the library had been validated and was approved for civil engineering purposes, porting it over would have been a ton of work and would not have served any purpose, besides it would have required recertification. As for VAXen: A VAX 11/780 is a 32 bit minicomputer, something the size of a large fridge (though later there were also smaller ones and today you could probably stick one on a business card). It had a - for the time - a relatively large amount of memory, and was a timesharing system, in other words, multiple people used the same computer via terminals. They weren't special per se other than that a whole raft of programmers from those days cut their teeth on them either because they came across them in universities or because they worked with them professionally. They were 'affordable' in the sense that you did not need to be a multinational or a bank in order to buy one, think a few hundred thousand $ (which was still quite a fortune back then). I had occasional access to one through the uni account of a friend, but never did any serious work with them. The first powerful machine I got my hands on was the Atari ST, which had a 68K chip in it and allowed the connection of a hard drive. Together those two things really boosted my capabilities, suddenly I had access to a whole 512K of RAM (later 1M) and some serious compute. Compared to a time shared VAX it was much better, though the VAX had more raw power. Concurrent to that I programmed on mainframes for a bank for about a year or so, as well as on the BBC Micro computer (6502 based) and the Dragon 32 (a UK based Color Computer clone). Fun times. Computing back then was both more and less accessible than it is today. More because the machines were so much simpler, less because you didn't have the internet at your disposal to look stuff up.
mcguire 3y ago
There was a freely available FORTRAN on the Fred Fish Amiga disks in the late 80s. It came with a weird license---free for everything, but it couldn't be used for military or military-related things. The 386 was hampered by backwards compatibility with the weird memory architecture for the 286 and 8086, IIRC. 68Ks were just soooo much easier.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Oh cool, I never knew that. 386 flat mode was easy enough, but only djgpp unlocked that properly, everything else was a hodgepodge of the weirdest memory models. I remember making a bootloader for my own OS using TurboC that somehow had to fish four files from a minix based filesystem and dump them in memory at certain addresses and then switch to flat mode and start executing the kernel which would then initialize the system properly. That was some really weird mixed mode voodoo to switch back and forth between protected mode and real mode to be able to both use BIOS calls to fetch blocks from disk and to be able to park the data in the right spots in contiguous memory. Very tricky stuff to get right, it took me forever before I had the first indication that something was executing after the inevitable hail Mary jump to the first instruction in the loaded kernel. But I got it to work. I actually had a guitar footpedal hooked to the reset button because it took me too many dives under the desk to recover from a crash. That was a very slow development cycle without any chance of debugging. At some point I had 8 leds hooked up to the printer port to use some 'out' opcodes to tell me where I had gotten to in the code. Poor mans emulator :)

mcguire 3y ago

FORTRAN didn't officially grow a program stack until FORTRAN 90 (?), although I'm told some of the earlier FORTRAN 77-era compilers supported it. I remember meeting people who could not wrap their heads around the idea that function parameters weren't all passed by reference. The idea of recursion would have caused them to detonate.