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from the Get-Off-My-Extremely-Efficient-Lawn dept.
Ars technica looks at Fortran, and some new number crunching languages in Scientific computing's future: Can any coding language top a 1950s behemoth?
This state of affairs seems paradoxical. Why, in a temple of modernity employing research instruments at the bleeding edge of technology, does a language from the very earliest days of the electronic computer continue to dominate? When Fortran was created, our ancestors were required to enter their programs by punching holes in cardboard rectangles: one statement per card, with a tall stack of these constituting the code. There was no vim or emacs. If you made a typo, you had to punch a new card and give the stack to the computer operator again. Your output came to you on a heavy pile of paper. The computers themselves, about as powerful as today's smartphones, were giant installations that required entire buildings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 09 2014, @10:17AM
Is it true that those computers were as powerful as smartphones?
What were the specs: cores, ram, clockspeed ...
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 09 2014, @10:32AM
So, 256 kB of memory, with 1MHz clock (no need to go faster, you wouldn't be able to read the memory anyway), looked approximately like this [wikipedia.org].
And this is [wikipedia.org] how the "flash memory stick" of that time looked like - it was indeed "portable"... provided you were wearing a van as a coat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by egcagrac0 on Friday May 09 2014, @01:28PM
Ahh, the good old days, when "hard disk" was not the same as "hard drive"...
(Score: 3, Informative) by choose another one on Friday May 09 2014, @11:20AM
I doubt it. I reckon a modern low-end smartphone is about on a par with a 10yr old reasonable spec desktop pc. All except for persistent storage where the PC probably had more in spinning rust than you get on a sd card these days. But not by much. Go back another 10yrs or so and 16MB ram was a lot, disk was hundreds of MB and CPU tens of MHz. By the early 80's you are back to 10s of KB and a 1MHz CPU on the desktop.
If we're charitable and take the biggest stuff at the very end of the 1950s, then you are looking at something like IBM 7000 series with 32k Words RAM and 100 KFlops.
My first Fortran was late 80s on VAXen which probably topped out at 5Mhz and 16M RAM - shared between a bunch of people and charged back to your dept. by the CPU-second. Unless you were one of the incredibly lucky / demi-gods who got their own VaxStation. Still nowhere near the power of a modern feature phone let alone smart phone.
Is it true ? - No, out by a few orders of magnitude or a few decades.