Re: Yes, but.
"Ah, Fortran. I think I still have the book on that.
A surprising language. I'm rather glad I never had to use it professionally."
My first attempts at programming were when I was still at school using a subset of Fortran known as "Portran" (Port-a-Punch Fortran).
This used pre-punched cards that you attacked with a bent paper clip to push out the required chads to create the code on the cards. We learnt a lot about 'hanging chads', long before they became famous as a muddying factor in election results.
Our completed stacks of cards were taken to one of the local banks, which would send them off to be batch-processed after their own jobs had been run (once a week and only if they hadn't used all their paid for machine time) - there is nothing like the disappointment of waiting 2 or 3 weeks to get your results back and finding the run had been sabotaged by a stray chad and that the result of all your work and patience was (IIRC) "Syntax error causes execution failure".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
