>> Now C is a great language, but it’s terrible at handling character strings and C clearly isn’t period appropriate. So I’m going to use FORTRAN instead. I’m not enough of a masochist to use the dialect of FORTRAN that John Backus invented in 1954 (close enough to 1953 for my purposes) but FORTRAN 77 will be able to do the job, and is still retro enough.
Why not go full-Voyager on this, and use "FORTRAN 5"? :)