
First FORTRAN program runs, September 20, 1954 - jamesbritt
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4396778/1st-FORTRAN-program-runs--September-20--1954
======
_kst_
So the first FORTRAN program was run 3 years before the first FORTRAN compiler
was delivered. Was the program manually translated to assembly/machine code?

~~~
dalke
I'm having a tough time trying to find the answer to that question.

Most sites just repeat this date as a factoid, with no context.

I looked at the videos mentioned at
[http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/index.h...](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/index.html#Films/video)
as well as some of the documents linked to elsewhere from that page.

One of the more interesting was the specification, dated November 10, 1954, at
[http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/10...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/102679231.05.01.acc.pdf)
. It's interesting because of the level of detail in the specification

The most relevant description I found was [http://www.combat-
diaries.co.uk/diary29/whirlwind.htm](http://www.combat-
diaries.co.uk/diary29/whirlwind.htm) .

> It was a modest effort. At first, it consisted of Backus, an easy-going
> young man with a master's in mathematics from Co­lumbia University, and
> Irving Ziller, another programmer. By the summer of 1954, three more
> programmers had joined the team, and they began running test programs on an
> IBM 701 in the IBM complex at 590 Madison Avenue, in Manhattan. From the
> begin­ning, the group concentrated on the compiler. "We simply made up the
> language [the commands that make up a user's program] as we went along,"
> Backus recalled.

> We did not regard language design as a difficult problem, merely a simple
> prelude to the real problem: designing a com­piler which could produce
> efficient [binary] programs. Of course one of our goals was to design a
> language which would make it possible for engineers and scientists to write
> programs for the 704. We also wanted to eliminate a lot of the bookkeep­ing
> and detailed, repetitive planning which hand coding [in as­sembly language]
> involved.

> Backus and his team began writing the compiler in early 1955, after a year
> and a half of preliminary work.

This tell us that the first FORTRAN program (1954) was not run on the compiler
that didn't start until 1955, and which was eventually shipped.

What I remember from Richard Waychoff's "Stories about the B5000 and People
Who Were There", which concerned Burrough's ALGOL development in the early
1960s, was that in that era people spent a lot of time in analysis, before
getting to the actual programming.

Waychoff proposes that the best schedule is "A. Design of the language
complete. B. Design of the Scanner complete. C. Design of the Statement
Parsers complete. D. Start of programming. E. Project successfully completed."

That model fits what I read about the FORTRAN development. That is, I think
the IBM people spent a lot of time developing the language, developing
algorithms for things like parsing, fleshing those out, and only then getting
to what we would consider to be the programming part proper.

All the research though, and I still can't tell you if the first FORTRAN
program was hand assembled. However, since Backus had already developed
Speedcoding, which was more like an interpreted assembler, my guess is that
the first program was processed in the same way, through a limited FORTRAN
interpreted that handled the subset of FORTRAN that they tested.

~~~
kps
I haven't found a reference to that date that's earlier than 4.4BSD's
/usr/share/calendar, which includes

    
    
        09/20 Harlan Herrick runs first FORTRAN program, 1954
    

In _The History of FORTRAN I, II, III_ (from HOPL I and available at your CHM
link), Backus writes:

    
    
        The FORTRAN compiler (or “translator” as we called it then) was begun
        in early 1955, although a lot of work on various schemes which would
        be used in it had been done in 1954; e.g. Herrick had done a lot of
        trial programming to test out our language [....]
    

So that's consistent.

------
ballard
I can't believe it has almost been 20 years since I last dealt with F95.

~~~
bbgm
Or 10 since I was writing a ton of code in F77

