Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

My mother was a programmer in this era. She got her degree in math in 1954. Rather than being a teacher, she went to work for Union Carbide in Buffalo to work on "this new thing called a computer". I have a great Union Carbide PR photo of her up on a stool, moving a jumper cable on a room-sized computer. I really need to digitize that.

She learned FORTRAN shortly after, and was a FORTRAN programmer for her entire career, later working at Calspan and then a spin-off defense contractor. She used FORTRAN for her entire career.

I fondly remember her making her grocery lists and taking notes on the used punch cards that she'd bring home from work.

My first internship in the late 80s was at another defense contractor, and I had to program a GUI in FORTRAN (!!) on a VAXstation. I remember coming to her for help, since I knew C and Lisp, and the whole FORTRAN column number thing threw me for a loop.

I remember seeing the VAXstation GUI bit in late 88 or so in grad school. It was weird interfacing Fortran and C calls back then.

I forgot the name of the interface, but I remember that creating a window to start working in was a very long function call in Fortran. Basically it opened an X window in the framework. You then set up a canvas and did more operations on it.

In 1990, I switched over to an SGI Irix machine, and graphics became much easier. We had a molecular dynamics viewer called "shaker" that was written in Irix GL at the time. Hard to use, and my thesis advisor and I didn't have SGIs in our office. So, I wrote my own version using Watcom Fortran(!) and called it "mover".

My thesis advisor shook her head at that ... as our visualization was with "mover" and "shaker".

"I fondly remember her making her grocery lists and taking notes on the used punch cards that she'd bring home from work."

Old cards were useful for making revision notes as well. And the 'paperthrow' command got accidentally put inside a loop on my batch jobs sometimes so I had plenty of nice large lineprint paper for notes. 1970s at university in UK. (We did Algol 68 but then I had to deal with fortran later as a postgrad)

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