Fortran in 2007

• Fifty Years of Fortran, a one day meeting organised jointly by the Fortran Specialist Group and the Computer Conservation Society was held on Thursday 25^th January 2007 at the BCS London Office, 5 Southampton Street WC2E 7HA.
  David Muxworthy wrote a report on the meeting which was published in Fortran Forum, Vol 26, No 1, April 2007.
  
  
• On Saturday 17^th March 2007 John W. Backus, who built and led the IBM team that created the first Fortran compiler, released in 1957, died at his home in Ashland, Oregon, at the age of 82.
  
  
• The journal "Scientific Programming" devoted its first issue for 2007 to a Special Issue: Fortran Programming Language and Scientific Programming: 50 years of Mutual Growth. It included contributions by Van Snyder, a longtime member of the J3 and WG5 Fortran committees, and John Reid, convenor of the WG5 committee and a member of the FSG committee.
  
  
• Between Monday 6^th August and Friday 10^th August 2007 the BCS London Office played host to a meeting of the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 Fortran committee on behalf of the British Standards Institution.
  
  
• Peter Crouch wrote an article The Origins of Fortran based on his presentation at the January meeting which was published in the Autumn 2007 issue of the Computer Conservation Society's Resurrection magazine. A bibliography for the article is available on the meeting Contributions page.
  
  
• A panel discussion entitled Fifty Years of Fortran was held on the morning of Thursday 15^th November 2007 at the Supercomputing 07 Conference in Reno, Nevada.
  Abstract: This special panel session will commemorate the 50-year anniversary of the release of the first Fortran compiler by examining the impact that Fortran has had on system software, applications, and computer architecture. Included also will be a brief look at the future of the Fortran programming language.
  Panellist Details:
  
  • Frances Allen (Chair) - IBM Emerita - introduction available as 204KB .ppt file or 218KB PDF file
    
  • David Padua - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - contribution available as 99KB .ppt file or 98KB PDF file
    
  • Henry M. Tufo - National Center for Atmospheric Research - contribution available as 2.3MB .ppt file or 864KB PDF file
    
  • John Levesque - Cray, Inc - contribution available as 38KB .ppt file or 34KB PDF file
    
  • Richard Hanson - Visual Numerics, Inc - contribution available as 176KB .ppt file or 141KB PDF file
  
  
  
• An article Fortran faces the future at 50 written by Peter Crouch, Clive Page and John Pelan was published in the December 2007 issue of the Institute of Physics' magazine Physics World.
  
  
• On December 18^th 2007 the BBC Radio World Service broadcast an item Fortran is 50 as part of its weekly Digital Planet programme. The presenter Gareth Mitchell interviewed Paul McJones of the Computer History Museum in California on the occasion of the 50^th birthday of Fortran. The programme was produced by Helena Selby with additional commentary by Bill Thompson.
  The 6 min 40 sec item is available as a 7.6MB MP3 file.

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