Computer History Notes - Herong's Tutorial Notes - v3.13, by Herong Yang
What Is FORTRAN
This section provides a quick introduction of FORTRAN language, a general-purpose and procedural programming language.
What Is FORTRAN? - FORTRAN is a general-purpose and procedural programming language developed in 1957 a team IBM team led by John Backus. FORTRAN is the short name for "The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System".
In 1957, IBM delivered the first FORTRAN compiler on IBM 704 mainframe computers. This first version of FORTRAN supported 32 statements.
In 1966, American Standards Association released the first industry standard specification of FORTRAN language: "ANSI X3.9-1966 - USA Standard FORTRAN". This version of FORTRAN is known as FORTRAN 66.
Later in 1978, ANSI published a major revision of FORTRAN 66: "ANSI X3.9-1978 - American National Standard - Programming Language FORTRAN". This version of FORTRAN is known as FORTRAN 77.
The next major revision of FORTRAN language was published in 1991 by ISO: "ISO/IEC 9593-1:1990 - Information processing systems - Computer graphics - Programmer's Hierarchical Interactive Graphics System (PHIGS) language bindings - Part 1: FORTRAN". This version of FORTRAN is known as Fortran 90. The name was changed from FORTRAN to Fortran because of this version introduced lowercase keywords support.
In 2003, another major revision was published by ISO: "ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1578 - Information technology - Programming languages - Fortran", known as Fortran 2003
The picture below shows the cover page the IBM manual: "Programmer's Reference Manual - Fortran - Automatic Code System for the IBM 704" published in 1956 (Source: www.fh-jena.de):
Table of Contents
2002 - .NET Framework Developed by Microsoft
1995 - PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor Created by Rasmus Lerdorf
1995 - Java Language Developed by Sun Microsystems
1991 - WWW (World Wide Web) Developed by Tim Berners-Lee
1991 - Gopher Protocol Created by a University of Minnesota Team
1984 - X Window System Developed a MIT Team
1984 - Macintosh Developed by Apple Inc.
1983 - "Sendmail" Mail Transfer Agent Developed by Eric Allman
1979 - The Tcsh (TENEX C Shell) Developed by Ken Greer
1978 - Bash (Bourne-Again Shell) Developed by Brian Fox
1978 - The C Shell Developed by Bill Joy
1977 - The Bourne Shell Developed by Stephen Bourne
1977 - Apple II Designed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
1976 - vi Text Editor Developed by Bill Joy
1974 - Internet by Vinton Cerf
1972 - C Language Developed by Dennis Ritchie
1971 - FTP Protocol Created by Abhay Bhushan
1970 - UNIX Operating System Developed by AT&T Bell Labs
►1957 - FORTRAN Language Developed by IBM
Storing FORTRAN Program Code on Punch Cards
FORTRAN 66 - Example Program Code
FORTRAN 77 - Example Program Code
g77 - GNU Project FORTRAN Compiler