Good stuff! I started with Fortran on a CDC 3300. I remember the Punch
Operator was Jennie. We would wait late at the computer bureau for our
results, usually failures, which would require Jennie to punch up a new
deck of cards next day. This was Transportation Modelling, so minimum
path
and capacity-restraint and economic benefit algorithms rather than matrix
inversion. I only encountered LAPACK many years later, but we would
speak
at the time in awe of 100-node networks, and would resort to coding in
machine-code to speed things up and save space, and trying to be clever
with buffering data to and from tape.
Perhaps ironically, one of this morning's BBC radio news headlines was
"US nuclear force still uses floppy disks", see eg
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36385839
- 8-inch disks at that!
I got the impression from the radio that they were still using Cobol, but
that wasn't said explicitly. The article includes this comment: "the US
treasury also needed to upgrade its systems, which it [a report] said was
using "assembly language code - a computer language initially used in the
1950s and typically tied to the hardware for which it was developed."
Not sure I believe that. Doesn't assembly language still sit there in the
background?
Bit off topic, but it is Jchat!
Mike
On 26/05/2016 13:31, Raul Miller wrote:
Scott Locklin's blog had an interesting writeup on fortran code and
some of the implications in the context of modern computing:
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2016/05/26/numeric-linear-algebra-code-an-appreciation/
Some of you here might be interested in that...
Thanks,
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