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: 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"...