Fifty Years of Fortran

Meeting organised jointly by the Fortran Specialist Group and the Computer Conservation Society

11.00 a.m. Thursday 25^th January, 2007
BCS London Office,
First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA

P R O G R A M M E

10.30	Coffee

	Morning Session - Chairman Roger Johnson, Chairman Computer Conservation Society
11.00	Welcome and Introduction
		Roger Johnson
11.05	The Origins of FORTRAN (available as 2.48MB .ppt file or 3.83MB PDF file)
		Including the 25th Anniversary celebrations in 1982 and followed by a screening of the IBM film of interviews with John Backus and colleagues - Peter Crouch, Chairman Fortran Specialist Group An article based on this presentation has been published in the Computer Conservation Society's Resurrection magazine. A bibliography for the article is available on the Contributions page

11.30	Early Experiences and Use of FORTRAN
		Bugs I Have Known and Loved - Ron Bell, AWE Aldermaston (available as 94KB .ppt file or 635KB PDF file) Using the first KDF9 FORTRAN compiler to implement APT in 1965-6 - Miles Ellis, former Convenor ISO Fortran Working Group (available as 57KB .ppt file or 93KB PDF file) Early experiences with FORTRAN I on IBM 704 computers in Paris, Dusseldorf, Risley and The Hague - 1959 to 1964 - Bill Olle (available as 222KB .ppt file or 724KB PDF file) FORTRAN versus Algol - David Hill, formerly MRC

		Written Contributions and Further Information

12.30	The background to the long gap between the 1977 and 1990 standards
		The Standards Hiatus - Miles Ellis, former Convenor ISO Fortran Working Group and Lawrie Schonfelder, Liverpool University (available as 69KB .ppt file or 1.72MB PDF file)
	Another view - from the 1990s
		The Fortran (not the foresight) saga: the light and the dark - the late Brian Meek, King's College, London
13.00	Lunch

	Afternoon Session - Chairman Peter Crouch
14.00	Implementing the Standards - including Fortran 2003
		Malcolm Cohen, Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd

14.30	Fortran Today - some current applications for Fortran
		Fortran - Alive and Well at AWE - Ron Bell, AWE Aldermaston (available as 87KB .ppt file or 499KB PDF file) The Met Office climate model HadSM3 and climateprediction.net - Michael Saunby, Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Change (available as 3.77MB .ppt file or 1.14MB .PDF file)
15.15	Tea break

15.30	The Future for Fortran - the current and next versions of the ISO standard
		The new features of Fortran 2003 - David Muxworthy, BSI Fortran Convenor (available as 667KB .ppt file or 483KB PDF file) What will be in Fortran 2008 - John Reid, Convenor ISO Fortran Working Group

16.00	Questions and Discussion
16.30	Close

	Photos taken at the meeting are available courtesy of Jane Sleightholme and John Reid

	David Muxworthy wrote a report of the meeting which was published in Fortran Forum, Vol 26, No 1, April 2007.

	See here for written contributions to the meeting and further information

Please Note

If you would like to make a written contribution to the record of the meeting please contact me.

Peter Crouch, Chairman and Web Editor, Fortran SG.

Comments on this or any other of the Group's pages should be sent by email to the FSG Web Editor.

Last modified: Sun 6 Jan 2013 12:19:17