FORTRAN T-shirt (Brent Hilpert)

[Chuck Guzis]

On 13 Aug 2007 at 10:59, Brian Knittel wrote:

> I'm still wondering how on earth that demonstration 
> snippet ended up on a T-shirt, but the owner really wasn't
> interested in talking about it. First off I don't think
> he spoke much English, second, I speak hardly any Spanish,
> and third, I think he found it impossible to imagine that 
> someone was really that interested in the shirt. He probably 
> thought I was hitting on him. (I have to admit, it's one of my 
> more tired pickup lines: "Hey, is that FORTRAN on your shirt?") 
> In any case he kind of squirmed around and wouldn't stand still 
> long enough for me to really read it carefully. I had a second, 
> third and fourth glance at it as we snaked through the check-in 
> line at the airport.

I might be concerned that FORTRAN meant something unintended in 
Spanish.  Sabe Vd. que el FORTRAN está en su camisa?  Er, maybe not.  
;)

There were so many FORTRAN variants; QUIKTRAN (no "C", sorry for the 
original typo) was pretty unique as an interactive language for the 
time.  JOSS was about the same time, but it wasn't a "standard" 
programming language and was actually pretty awkward.  IITRAN, at the 
time, was about the closest thing to interactive FORTRAN.  It was 
FORTRAN-ish, with many simplifications and limitations, and it only 
ran on IIT's 360/40 AFAIK.

Although it's hard to appreciate today, great suspicion was cast 
toward interactive programming at the time.  "Real" programmers sat 
down with coding pads and flowcharts and wrote their programs, desk-
checking everything, then had the code keypunched and compiled in 
batch mode.  It was odd, but machine time was valuable enough that it 
was cheaper to have a programmer sweat with a No. 2 pencil and coding 
pad and keypunch than to have the same programmer enter the program 
on a remote terminal.

And that's why I remember QUIKTRAN--it was interactive, and did 
syntax checking as statements were entered.  I tried to get CDC 
management interested in a "programmer's editor" that would run 
interactively with syntax checking, but ran into a brick wall of 
opposition.  Chief among the claims were that it was too expensive to 
have every programmer with a terminal and it would lead to "sloppy" 
code.

That was back around 1972.  

Cheers,
Chuck