How to set up a poll

Get help using the forums. If we can't help you, FEMA can.
User avatar
Denny
Posts: 24005
Joined: Mon Nov 17, 2003 11:29 am
antispam: No
Location: N of Seattle

Post by Denny »

Cork wrote:use a slide rule, and a book of trig tables.
I learned both....

I was doing land surveying when the first programmable calculators came out. :D I rewrote the traverse program to match the way we kept the log
Cork wrote:However, Fortran remained popular for many years, especially among engineers and scientists
:smirk: 'course...looked just like their equations. It was the bloody I/O that sucked.
Cork wrote:even today there could be limits as to what CAD could do, such that engineers could have no option but to return to fundamentals, to be sure that everything is accounted for, and that's where an antique such as Fortran could help to save the day.
I'm not seeing it. Fortran was good for crunchin' a lot of numbers. If you're going back to fundamentals just get your calculator out.
Cork
Posts: 3128
Joined: Tue Jan 16, 2007 7:02 am
antispam: No

Post by Cork »

Lemme see, as I recall, my first calculator was made by Texas Instruments, in 1971. It used an LED display, and therefore liked to have its battery recharged fairly often, too often, way too often. Then, along came LCD calculators, with much better battery life. However, all that algebraic entry nonsense went out the window in the late seventies, when I discovered Hewlett Packard and their Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) calculators. I became a real RPN fan. I still have an HP15C model, programmable with all the bells and whistles, from the mid-Eighties, which works just fine, to this day. Of course, that was made back when HP only made laboratory grade hardware, before HP got involved with the commercial PC market, etc.

For little things, I'd try to use my head, but failing that, I'd reach for a calculator. However, for really big things, it's possible that Fortran isn't dead yet.

Update: Whoa! There's even a new version in the works, Fortran 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran
User avatar
Denny
Posts: 24005
Joined: Mon Nov 17, 2003 11:29 am
antispam: No
Location: N of Seattle

Post by Denny »

yep, HP-97 I think, PRN, stack logic, a card reader and enough memory for 224 steps... I so needed 2 more for a truncate function...

sometimes we'd have to quit early 'cause we'd drowned the suckers.... take 'em home, let 'em dry out, they'd be fine in the morning.

'scuse me! they are still using Fortran :lol:
Cork
Posts: 3128
Joined: Tue Jan 16, 2007 7:02 am
antispam: No

Post by Cork »

Denny wrote:...'scuse me! they are still using Fortran :lol:


Wow, according to the wiki, Fortran appears to be alive and well today, and as a standard for bench marks, no less!
User avatar
Denny
Posts: 24005
Joined: Mon Nov 17, 2003 11:29 am
antispam: No
Location: N of Seattle

Post by Denny »

okay....I was more impressed with this
climate modeling[4], numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), computational physics, and computational chemistry
part :D
Post Reply