A history of the first practical programming language Fortran

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1 pointwhinvik3 comments

"And a bug was literally a real, physical bug!! In the wires." ... I think that's supposed to be a reference to an incident which happened with the Harvard Mark II, also known as Aiken Relay Calculator. Not the ENIAC. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug#History .

Thanks. For some reason I always associated that with ENIAC.

For all I know, ENIAC had (insect) bugs too!

My favorite old machine is the SEAC. First electronically stored program computer in the US (as I recall), and actively used in a variety of fields. Minksy learned to program on it, the first video image was made on it, it was an early (if not first) networked computer to DYSEC, its "portable" cousin. And it was actively shopped it around to different government organizations, to see if it could be applied to all sorts of different areas, so generated some of the foundational papers for a number of fields.

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