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Computer language fortran
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Recommended: Computer language fortran
"do real programmers program in fortran?" Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators and "user-friendly" software but back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, Real Programmers wrote in machine code. Not Fortran. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language. Machine Code.Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly.
Lest a whole new generation of programmers grow up in ignorance of this glorious past, I feel duty-bound to describe, as best I can through the generation gap, how a Real Programmer wrote code. I'll call him Mel, because that was his name.
I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp., a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company. The firm manufactured the LGP-30, a small, cheap (by the standards of the day) drum-memory computer, and had just started to manufacture the RPC-4000, a much-improved, bigger, better, faster -- drum-memory computer. Cores cost too much, and weren't here to stay, anyway. (That's why you haven't heard of the company, or the computer.)
I had been hired to write a Fortran compiler for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders. Mel didn't approve of compilers.
"If a program can't rewrite its own code," he asked, "what good is it?"
Mel had written, in hexadecimal, the most popular computer program the company owned. It ran on the LGP-30 and played blackjack with potential customers at computer shows. Its effect was always dramatic. The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show, and the IBM salesmen stood around talking to each other. Whether or not this actually sold computers was a question we never discussed.
Mel's job was to re-write the blackjack program for the RPC-4000. (Port? What does that mean?) The new computer had a one-plus-one addressing scheme, in which each machine instruction, in addition to the operation code and the address of the needed operand, had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum, the next instruction was located. In modern parlance, every single instruction was followed by a GO TO! Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it.
Mel loved the RPC-4000 because he could optimize his code: that is, locate instructions on the drum so that just as one finished its job, the next would be just arriving at the "read head" and available for immediate execution.
of the FORTAN programming language: “You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have
The software for the Therac-25 was an evolution from the two previous machines, the Therac-6 and the Therac-20. The development of the software was completed by only one programmer. The Therac-25 relied much more heavily on its software than the previous versions, which relied mostly on the operator. This machine also changed the way safety checks were performed; critical safety checks were included in the hardware and software of previous machines, but only software on the Therac-25 (Death and Denial, The Software).
to leave everything running all the time or print what they typed for the day and retype it the next day or they could save it to a I/O card” (“Computers” Internet). All three of these choices posed as a problem from programmers of that time, as first off to leave on the computer would cost a lot of money as it required a lot of money to maintain them while they are on.
saw the future demands of the computer industry. He was able to build a personal
“In 1946, John Mauchly and J Presper Eckert developed the fastest computer at that time, the ENIAC I. It was built under the assistance of the US army, and it was used on military researches. The ENIAC I contained 17468 vacuum tubes, along with 70000 resistors, 10000 capacitors, 1500 relays, 6000 manual switches and 5 million soldered joints. It covered 1800 square feet of floor space, weighed 3 tons, consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power.”(Bellis, Inventors of Modern Computer)
In 1970, Intel got into the microprocessor business with Busicom, a Jap firm, as collaborators. During late 70s, Apple collaborated with Motorola for microprocessor purchases against Intel who had sim...
Another activity that Gates and his friends used to enjoy was going through their local software company’s garbage, looking for discarded software programs. When they found these progra...
began to take over the worlds market for tabulators, clocks, and electric type writers. By 1940 it was the us largest office firms that deals with machines. There sales had reach $50 million.
The Host interrupted the Tale of Sir Thopas, pleading with the narrator to desist. He told him that the rhymes were doggerel, and asks him to tell a tale in prose. The narrator agrees and asks for the group's attention once more.
"There's no doubt that Kildall was one of the pioneers of the industry. He invented the first operating system for microcomputers in the early 1970s, making it possible for hobbyists and companies to build the first personal computers. Legalities aside, Microsoft's original DOS was based in part on Kildall's CP/M. His insight was that by an creating operating system separate from the hardware, applications...
Many different types of programming languages are used to write programs for computers. The languages are called "codes". Some of the languages include C++, Visual Basic, Java, XML, Perl, HTML, and COBOL. Each of the languages differs from each other, and each is used for specific program jobs. HTML and JAVA are languages used to build web pages for the Internet. Perl and XML can produce codes that block students from getting on certain inappropriate web pages on their school server. One of the most prominent programming languages of the day would have to be C++.
Built in to his machine were operations that included everything a modern general-purpose computer would need. It was programmed by--and stored data on--cards with holes
Programming is more fun and astonishingly useful as it build your creativity and creates new career doors for those passionate about it. Most people today don’t really know how a computer works even thou they can simply turn on a computer or a mobile phone by just clicking on some buttons or swiping a finger or two and the computer does what they want. Learning how to write computer programs will require one to understand how a computer works.
The fist computer, known as the abacus, was made of wood and parallel wires on which beads were strung. Arithmetic operations were performed when the beads were moved along the wire according to “programming” rules that had to be memorized by the user (Soma, 14). The second earliest computer, invented by Blaise Pascal in 1694, was a “digital calculating machine.” Pascal designed this first known digital computer to help his father, who was a tax collector. Pascal’s computer could only add numbers, and they had to be entered by turning dials (Soma, 32). It required a manual process like its ancestor, the abacus. Automation was introduced in the early 1800’s by a mathematics professor named Charles Babbage. He created an automatic calculation machine that was steam powered and stored up to 1000 50-digit numbers. Unlike its two earliest ancestors, Babbage’s invention was able to perform various operations. It relied on cards with holes punched in them, which are called “punch cards.” These cards carried out the programming and storing operations for the machine. Unluckily, Babbage’s creation flopped due to the lack of mechanical precision and the lack of demand for the product (Soma, 46). The machine could not operate efficiently because technology was t adequate to make the machine operate efficiently Computer interest dwindled for many years, and it wasn’t until the mid-1800’s that people became interested in them once again.
This machine could do math, display graphics at the drop of a dime, and play two dimensional games (whic was all that was around back then). This wasn't something that you normally saw. This was something that seemed to come straight out of a science fiction film. At least that was what I thought.