Business Idea
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I was going to choose a nonsense name, in the tradition of Hotbot, Yahoo, GoDaddy, etc., but I appreciate the suggestion. Here are the beginnings of my business plan: 1) This is the most important: Fortran programmers probably make good money. Many of them are PhDs. Like the nurses in "Glengarry Glen Ross", they are hot prospects, with steady employment. 2) Fortran programmers can express themselves effectively in 80-character units. This makes them an ideal target for something like Twitter.
You missed out two: 3) FORTRAN programmers that use 80 column input format these days are mostly in retirement homes and think that "twitter" is something their carers do incessantly. The 80 column limit was removed from nearly every system in 1977... 4) FORTRAN programmers can only express themselves in FORTRAN. Native languages with vowels and all are an anathema to them. As are friends, so the concept of Social Anything just doesn't compute. And yes, I learnt FORTRAN as my second language at Uni, after COBOL... :laugh:
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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You missed out two: 3) FORTRAN programmers that use 80 column input format these days are mostly in retirement homes and think that "twitter" is something their carers do incessantly. The 80 column limit was removed from nearly every system in 1977... 4) FORTRAN programmers can only express themselves in FORTRAN. Native languages with vowels and all are an anathema to them. As are friends, so the concept of Social Anything just doesn't compute. And yes, I learnt FORTRAN as my second language at Uni, after COBOL... :laugh:
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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OriginalGriff wrote:
And yes, I learnt FORTRAN as my second language at Uni, after COBOL... :laugh:
I'm surprised you would 'fess up to that! ;) Actually, FORTRAN was my second language as well... after ALGOL! :omg:
ALGOL they taught us at the beginning of Year 2 - and I hated it. I spent some of the summer Industrial Training learning Pascal, so ALGOL was a bit of a major step backwards... :-D
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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ALGOL they taught us at the beginning of Year 2 - and I hated it. I spent some of the summer Industrial Training learning Pascal, so ALGOL was a bit of a major step backwards... :-D
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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You missed out two: 3) FORTRAN programmers that use 80 column input format these days are mostly in retirement homes and think that "twitter" is something their carers do incessantly. The 80 column limit was removed from nearly every system in 1977... 4) FORTRAN programmers can only express themselves in FORTRAN. Native languages with vowels and all are an anathema to them. As are friends, so the concept of Social Anything just doesn't compute. And yes, I learnt FORTRAN as my second language at Uni, after COBOL... :laugh:
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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You're an idiot. Twitter is a waste of bandwidth. Besides, what are fortran programmers going to do with the extra 60 characters they get in a twitter message.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997 -
You children. My first language at school was FORTRAN; my second was IBM 370 assembly language.
Software Zen:
delete this;A 370? You lucky, lucky b'stard! I still had to deal with a 360/195 in the eighties...
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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You're an idiot. Twitter is a waste of bandwidth. Besides, what are fortran programmers going to do with the extra 60 characters they get in a twitter message.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997 -
ALGOL they taught us at the beginning of Year 2 - and I hated it. I spent some of the summer Industrial Training learning Pascal, so ALGOL was a bit of a major step backwards... :-D
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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A 370? You lucky, lucky b'stard! I still had to deal with a 360/195 in the eighties...
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
<OldCodgerReminiscence> This was in the spring of 1980. My school[^] had an IBM 370 mainframe that they used to run the university, for academic classes, and they rented out for time-share to several local banks. While I was there it was upgraded to a model 3033. Unfortunately most student work was submitted using punched cards. Our keypunch machines were legendary with the local IBM rep for the amount of abuse they received. I just remember how awful the things were. It routinely took shifting between several machines to get a deck of a thousand cards punched because of the constant jams, belt breakages, and so on. I also remember an operating systems class I took where the professor got in trouble. The class used Pascal, where our code was linked to an operating system simulator and then executed. Supposedly our class of eight consumed $15,000 worth of computing time in a single 10 week quarter, which was a significant portion of the computer science department's budget and far exceeded the time the class was originally allotted. </OldCodgerReminiscence>
Software Zen:
delete this; -
John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
Twitter is a waste of bandwidth.
Yeh, move over twitter make more room for pr0n. :rolleyes:
Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn
Folding Stats: Team CodeProject
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You missed out two: 3) FORTRAN programmers that use 80 column input format these days are mostly in retirement homes and think that "twitter" is something their carers do incessantly. The 80 column limit was removed from nearly every system in 1977... 4) FORTRAN programmers can only express themselves in FORTRAN. Native languages with vowels and all are an anathema to them. As are friends, so the concept of Social Anything just doesn't compute. And yes, I learnt FORTRAN as my second language at Uni, after COBOL... :laugh:
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
I know a C# dev that 'still' sets an 80 column limit. At least he can split his code lines over many text lines.
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<OldCodgerReminiscence> This was in the spring of 1980. My school[^] had an IBM 370 mainframe that they used to run the university, for academic classes, and they rented out for time-share to several local banks. While I was there it was upgraded to a model 3033. Unfortunately most student work was submitted using punched cards. Our keypunch machines were legendary with the local IBM rep for the amount of abuse they received. I just remember how awful the things were. It routinely took shifting between several machines to get a deck of a thousand cards punched because of the constant jams, belt breakages, and so on. I also remember an operating systems class I took where the professor got in trouble. The class used Pascal, where our code was linked to an operating system simulator and then executed. Supposedly our class of eight consumed $15,000 worth of computing time in a single 10 week quarter, which was a significant portion of the computer science department's budget and far exceeded the time the class was originally allotted. </OldCodgerReminiscence>
Software Zen:
delete this;Please, don't remind me of University card punch machines. I ended up doing so much with a hand punch, that I could read those twelve rows of holes about as fast as I could read text...which was just as well, given that the card punches had always run out of ink ribbon. :laugh:
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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OriginalGriff wrote:
And yes, I learnt FORTRAN as my second language at Uni, after COBOL... :laugh:
I'm surprised you would 'fess up to that! ;) Actually, FORTRAN was my second language as well... after ALGOL! :omg:
My first - and I still have the boxes of punched cards for the programs I wrote in College 40+ years ago in a closet :sigh:
Steve _________________ I C(++) therefore I am
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You're an idiot. Twitter is a waste of bandwidth. Besides, what are fortran programmers going to do with the extra 60 characters they get in a twitter message.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
Besides, what are fortran programmers going to do with the extra 60 characters they get in a twitter message.
Duh. They'll use that 'extra' space for ASCII art pictures of Mr. Spock. Do I have to spell out every little detail? Being an entrepreneur is exhausting.
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Please, don't remind me of University card punch machines. I ended up doing so much with a hand punch, that I could read those twelve rows of holes about as fast as I could read text...which was just as well, given that the card punches had always run out of ink ribbon. :laugh:
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
We had a guy in my data structures class who was blind. He could read the punched cards with his fingers. I remember him saying it was much slower than reading Braille, since he had to stroke down the column to read the entire character.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
ALGOL they taught us at the beginning of Year 2 - and I hated it. I spent some of the summer Industrial Training learning Pascal, so ALGOL was a bit of a major step backwards... :-D
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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A 370? You lucky, lucky b'stard! I still had to deal with a 360/195 in the eighties...
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
Only about nine 360/195s were sold so where was this? BAL (Basic Assembly Language) did not change between the 360 and the 370 so you can go back to an old 360/20 and learn to program within 4K of memory! PS. Yes, that was no typo. People did program with those kinds of constraints and successfully too. By the way, 1 MB of main memory in the late 1970s occupied a box that was approximately 6'x3'x6' and cost $100,000.
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Prof C A R Hoare (a major figure in Computer Science but C freaks and Unix eunuchs who swear by K&R would not have heard his name) once said, "Algol 60 is an improvement over all of its successors."
He invented Quick Sort! Everybody should have heard of him - you've used his algorithm more times than you've eaten hot dinners...
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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Only about nine 360/195s were sold so where was this? BAL (Basic Assembly Language) did not change between the 360 and the 370 so you can go back to an old 360/20 and learn to program within 4K of memory! PS. Yes, that was no typo. People did program with those kinds of constraints and successfully too. By the way, 1 MB of main memory in the late 1970s occupied a box that was approximately 6'x3'x6' and cost $100,000.
Here[^] - when it was just the Rutherford Labs, and had an Atlas Computer Division, physically right next door to the Harwell Nuclear Research base. That was always fun! They shared medical facilities which were based in the armed-guard-and-no-f'ing-about part (since Harwell understandably had seriously good facilities) which lead to a friend being taken to get a couple of paracetamol for her headache with an armed motorcycle escort. All she did has admit her name was Krys Zarczynski, and she was from Poland... :laugh:
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
