I note that the COBOL standards committee has re-formed.
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Yes, it was that one! Wayback machine even includes their FAQ section, which is the funniest part of this petition.
Where can one watch it?
See that post:
One of the First Computer-Generated Films, from 1963 - AT&T Archives
This film was a specific project to define how a particular type of satellite would move through space. Edward E. Zajac made, and narrated, the film, which is considered to be possibly the very first computer graphics film ever. Zajac programmed the calculations in FORTRAN, then used a program written by Zajac’s colleague, Frank Sinden, called ORBIT. The original computations were fed into the computer via punch cards, then the output was printed onto microfilm using the General Dynamics Electronics Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder. All computer processing was done on an IBM 7090 or 7094 series computer.
Zajac didn’t make the film to demonstrate computer graphics, however. Instead, he was interested in real-time modeling of a certain theoretical construct. At the time, The Bell System was still deeply engaged in satellite research, having launched Telstar the previous year, with plans to continue developing communications satellites. Zajac’s model is of a box (“satellite”), with two gyroscopes within. In the film, he was trying to create a simulation of movement — the pitch, roll, and yaw within that system. He gives these particulars in an article in the Bell System Technical Journal, from 1964.
The article is here.
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That’s the first anime I actually like… 
By the way, the book she is reading exists.
Sure it is. And referenced/cited on a regular basis on this forum as MFE
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I even have a signed copy!
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J. M. Coetzee is the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. But he began its carreer as a programmer. He even wrote poetry generators in machine code and in FORTRAN:
https://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2017/06/28/the-computer-poetry-of-j-m-coetzees-early-programming-career/
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Stealing this image to use as a meme.
When my codes don’t compile a missing comma, for example after the format string, is still often the reason. It’s impressive that in 1957 a compiler was providing a specific diagnostic.
For the code
print "(*(1x,f0.4))" (sqrt(real(i)),i=1,5)
end
gfortran says
missing_comma.f90:1:21:
1 | print "(*(1x,f0.4))" (sqrt(real(i)),i=1,5)
| 1
Error: Expected comma in I/O list at (1)
Maybe tools that use compiler error messages to fix codes should be developed.
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While arranging to visit Vera Molnár, heralded as a pioneer of early computer art, at her nursing home in central Paris, I was warned that the interview might have to be brief. Having recently turned 98, the artist gets tired easily.
Not so for her groundbreaking work, produced from algorithms written in the primordial programming language of Fortran, which seems only to be gaining new relevance as the world catches up with her enthusiasm for creative coding. Still, as I checked-in to one of the few places where France still requires masks and Covid passes, I hoped I wasn’t hounding an old woman who was long past wanting to talk to the press. These fears, thankfully, disappeared as Molnár rose quite spritely from her desk and welcomed me into her room.
…
She would not rely on her imagination for long. In 1968, Molnár gained access to a computer owned by the Sorbonne after applying to the dean three times. Computers were reserved for scientific computing at the time. Having taught herself Fortran, she began feeding in instructions on a punch card. This arduous process is known as blind computing, since the user has to wait hours or days to see the results drawn out by a mechanical plotter. In her “Interruptions,” from this time, the lines in a grid are rotated or erased at random to create an animated and unpredictable composition. These experiments provoked her peers, whom she remembered as being “scandalized!—I had dehumanized art.”
…
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I will put these at my office door…
Frank Engel and Lew Ondis ran it. Bright was the manager of the group. It was not the first Fortran run, it was the first run outside of IBM. They were employees of Westinghouse, but were contracted to the Bettis Naval Propulsion lab. They both said the first persons that ran a job were actually the Operators, as the Fortran compiler deck came with a confidence test that ran a problem as part of verifying the compiler; but since you phrased it as the “first non-test program” that excludes that run, although they never did. Lew was later on the standards Fortran committee and proposed an IF/ELSE/ENDIF-like addition long before it was adopted; I remember him still being miffed it had not been adapted until virtually every other higher-level language had it :>. Jim Callagan was the lead programmer on the code that was run, but Lew and Frank were the ones that got the compiler and code to run and created the deck that was run. There are quite a few references to that effect. Just one of many …
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4392947
You can still find their names in the earliest publications that survive; a short one with a lot of history to it that caused a lot of conversations was
[EO66] Frank A. Engel III and Lewis A. OndisII. On behalf of FORTRAN.Comm.ACM, 9(4):257, April 1966. CODENCACMA2.ISSN 0001-0782 (print),1557-7317 (electronic).
His name shows up in some places as Ondisll, but it was Lewis A. Ondis II (the second).
I cannot find an unencumbered copy of information about SHARE that is on-line, but
it is funny to read (a printed copy) of
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25147801
which laments the lack of sharing code and the unnecessary duplication of coding; circa the late 50s – sound familiar? Nothing new under the sun …
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FORTRAN Anecdotes from the (Fortran) Pioneer Day banquet (1982) have more about Frank Engel, who not only used the IBM Fortran compiler but improved its performance by looking at an octal dump of it. Engel’s 2020 obituary says
He became interested in computers in the early 1950’s while working at Westinghouse Electric’s Atomic Power Division, where he was part of the team that developed the controls for the nuclear reactor in the USS Nautilus, the world’s first atomic-powered submarine. He became an expert on IBM’s mainframe computers and was in on the ground floor of their programming and use; he also worked on the international standardization of the computer programming language FORTRAN.
and Ondis’s 2008 obituary says
He was a principal mathematician and scientific computer programmer at the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory for 52 years. Mr. Ondis was among the first to test and use the now-standard Fortran language developed by IBM for scientific computing. For many years he was the lead developer at Bettis for Monte Carlo computer programs used in the design and analysis of naval nuclear reactors, including the Nautilus (the first nuclear submarine) and the first commercial nuclear power plant at Shippingport, Pa.
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Having your obituary mention Fortran gives some idea of just how involved they were with it, not just from it’s early development but for many years after! Missed to this day by all that knew them. That 52 is not a typo, by the way – how many people have a 50th Service Year party?
An entire OS programmed in Fortran IV + assembler.
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@conradoat - My first job out of college was for a small magazine publisher that used a Prime 300 to run their subscription business. I know that the file system was in FORTRAN (a rather bastardized FORTRAN IV with many extensions), as I often applied source patches to it. It would not astonish me if PRIMOS itself had significant FORTRAN.
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It seems that the amount of FORTRAN code is in fact significant.