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Early History of Software
In 1993 the National Academy of Engineering awarded its Charles Stark Draper Prize to John Backus, ‘‘for his development of FORTRAN ... the first general-purpose, high-level computer language’’ (Seng, pp3).
By the 1990s its development and marketing overshadowed hardware, which was becoming in some cases a cheap mass-produced commodity (Seng, pp 3). -
Birth of FORTRAN Program
FORTRAN, computer programming language created in the early 1950s by John Backus that shortened the process of programming and made computer programming more accessible. The first successful Fortran program ran on September 20, 1954 on the IBM 704 vacuum tube computer. -
Development of FORTRAN
The first FORTRAN compiler was delivered in April 1957. FORTRAN became the first computer language standard, and it helped open the door to modern computing. One of the listed author's was Robert Hughes. -
Fortran II
Fortran II, released in 1958, added support for subroutines, which enabled programmers to reuse code and improve program modularity (Backus et al., 1953). -
FORTRAN III
IBM also developed a FORTRAN III in 1958 that allowed for inline assembly code among other features; however, this version was never released as a product. Like its predecessors FORTRAN I and II, it had machine-dependent features that made code written in it unportable from machine to machine. -
Dorothy Vaughan FORTRAN Expert at NASA
Dorothy Vaughan became an expert in FORTRAN programming at NASA after teaching herself and her colleagues the language in the early 1960s. Vaughan was a mathematician who worked as a "human computer" at NASA, performing complex calculations by hand.
Dorothy Vaughan and many of the former West Computers joined the new Analysis and Computation Division (ACD), a racially and gender-integrated group on the frontier of electronic computing. -
FORTRAN IV
FORTRAN IV removed machine-dependent features of FORTRAN II and added new features like logical Boolean expressions, a LOGICAL data type, and the logical IF statement, released in 1962 by IBM. The first version of FORTRAN IV was released for the IBM 7030 computer. -
FORTRAN 66—First Computer Language to be Standardized
Fortran was first standardized in March 1966 by the then American Standards Association (ASA), by the X3·.4.3 subcommittee. In 1969, the name of the American Standards Association was changed to American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the X3.4.3 subcommittee has subsequently become known as the X3J3 technical committee. -
FORTRAN 77
FORTRAN 77 became the most widely-used version of the language, and it is likely that much of the legacy FORTRAN code around the world is written in this dialect of the language. The resulting standard would take eight years to reach maturity, but the language it defined, known as FORTRAN 77, represented a major enhancement. Among the features which it added were a true block IF statement, a CHARACTER data type, direct-access I/O and the PARAMETER statement to define constants. -
FORTRAN 90
Supported two forms of source code; the old Fortran 77 source code form (now called fixed form), and the new free form. Using free source form, columns are no longer reserved and so Fortran statements can now appear anywhere on a source line. The source line may contain up to 132 characters. FORTRAN 90 Beginner's Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_ZNWPNzspg -
FORTRAN 95
Fortran 95 provided an improvement over Fortran 90 in that it allows user defined functions in specification expressions. The specification function had a requirement that they be pure. This prevents them from having side affects that could affect other objects being declared in the same specification part . -
FORTRAN 2003—Modern Fortran
Both Fortran 90 and 95 introduced features that allowed object-oriented programming (OOP). The world had come a long way now that Fortran accommodated object-oriented code! Fortran 2003, the next standard, added even more features to enhance the object-oriented capability. -
NASA Project—Copernicus spacecraft trajectory optimization program
At NASA in general, many spacecraft trajectory optimization problems are solved using Fortran tools such as SORT [13], OTIS [14], MALTO [15], Mystic [16], and Copernicus. Other historic Fortran 77 tools have been replaced or rewritten in other programming languages. FortranCon2020 [JP]: Copernicus Spacecraft Trajectory Design and Optimization Program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UlY7gdDHQY -
FORTRAN 2008
Fortran 2008 is a minor revision of Fortran 2003, and includes new features like:
Submodules, Coarrays, do concurrent construct, contiguous attribute, block construct, exit statement, and error stop statement. -
FORTRAN 2018
An earlier iteration was referred to as FORTRAN 2015. Fortran 2018 incorporates two previously published Technical Specifications: TS 29113: Further Interoperability of Fortran with C AND
TS 18508: Additional Parallel Features in Fortran. Also, Fortran 2018 deleted the arithmetic IF statement. It also deleted non-block DO constructs - loops which do not end with an END DO or CONTINUE statement. These had been an obsolescent part of the language since Fortran 90. -
FORTRAN 2023—Present
Fortran 2023 supported two variants of enumeration types. One variant extends the pre-existing C-interoperability feature of enum and the other one provides Fortran-specific enumeration types with additional semantics that are incompatible with those of C-style enums.