Louisville, KY
Greg is a retired neurologist in Louisville, Kentucky, with a long-standing interest in computers and programming, beginning with Fortran IV in the 1960s. When Linux and open source software came along, it kindled a commitment to learning more, and eventually contributing. He is a member of the Scribus Team.
Authored Comments
I first learned Fortran IV as part of a computer science class (yet they had computer science in the 1960's!). At that time, you wrote your program on paper, then transferred it to IBM punch cards. You then had to submit your "job" so that it could be run. You found out about your results the next day, when you might get your printed results wrapped around your cards, or you might get nothing because they wouldn't run, or you might get pages and pages of output, eventually cut off since you created some never-ending loop.
Later on, a great new development was WatFor (named for the Univ of Waterloo in Canada, where it was developed), which was Fortran on a terminal, so now you could enter your program and run it yourself -- of course, that meant you had your little space on the mainframe to store your programs. So now you could create your endless loops live!
Most of today's languages didn't exist then -- it was mostly Fortran, COBOL, and assembly.
Thanks, Peter. Sometimes we don't have a choice about the format, and a PDF is all we can get.