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Fortran in 2007
- Fifty Years of Fortran, a one day meeting
organised jointly by the Fortran Specialist Group and the Computer Conservation
Society was held on Thursday 25th January 2007 at the
BCS London Office, 5 Southampton Street WC2E 7HA.
David Muxworthy wrote a report
on the meeting which was published in Fortran Forum, Vol 26, No 1, April 2007.
- On Saturday 17th March 2007 John W. Backus,
who built and led the IBM team that created the first Fortran compiler, released in
1957, died at his home in Ashland, Oregon, at the age of 82.
- The journal "Scientific Programming" devoted its first issue for 2007
to a Special Issue:
Fortran
Programming Language and Scientific Programming: 50 years of Mutual Growth. It
included contributions by Van Snyder, a longtime member of the J3 and WG5 Fortran
committees, and John Reid, convenor of the WG5 committee and a member of the FSG
committee.
- Between Monday 6th August and Friday 10th August 2007 the
BCS London Office played host to a meeting of the
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 Fortran committee on behalf of
the British Standards Institution.
- Peter Crouch wrote an article
The Origins of Fortran
based on his presentation at the January meeting which was published in the Autumn
2007 issue of the Computer Conservation Society's Resurrection magazine. A
bibliography for the article is available on the meeting
Contributions page.
- A panel discussion entitled
Fifty
Years of Fortran was held on the morning of Thursday 15th November
2007 at the Supercomputing 07 Conference in Reno, Nevada.
Abstract: This special panel session will commemorate the 50-year anniversary of
the release of the first Fortran compiler by examining the impact that Fortran has
had on system software, applications, and computer architecture. Included also will
be a brief look at the future of the Fortran programming language.
Panellist Details:
Frances Allen (Chair), IBM Emerita
David Padua, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Henry M. Tufo, National Center for Atmospheric Research
John Levesque, Cray, Inc
Richard Hanson, Visual Numerics, Inc.
- An article Fortran
faces the future at 50 written by Peter Crouch, Clive Page and John Pelan
was published in the December 2007 issue of the Institute of Physics' magazine
Physics World.
- On December 18th 2007 the BBC Radio World Service broadcast an item
Fortran is 50 as part of its weekly Digital Planet
programme. The presenter Gareth Mitchell interviewed Paul McJones of the Computer
History Museum in California on the occasion of the 50th birthday of
Fortran. The programme was produced by Helena Selby with additional commentary by
Bill Thompson.
The 6 min 40 sec item is available as a 7.6MB MP3 file.
Comments on this or any other of the Group's pages should be sent by e-mail to the
FSG Web Editor.
Last modified: Wed 11 Jun 2008 22:54:54
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