I took pretty much the same image! The work is on display at the Athens ΕΜΣΤ (National Museum of Contemporary Art) where they are having a Xenakis exhibition. The deck on display must represent an earlier program than the one (on GitHub) I transcribed from a later edition of his book Formalized Music - Wikipedia (also on display). That later edition also contains C and Basic code.
From Michael Thompson in a private Facebook group for DEC alumni:
I have been maintaining the PDP-9 at the Rhode Island Computer Museum for more than 10 years. It was in storage for 20 years after being donated to the RICM. After reviving it, it has been reliable so we can demonstrate it on Saturdays. We moved the museum’s display space last year, and the PDP-9 was not happy with the move. We had a really long struggle to get the PDP-9 running again. We found several failed transistors, made lots of core memory tuning adjustments, and finally we found a failed +10VDC fuse that was causing problems with the paper tape reader.
Yesterday it booted the ADSS operating system from DECtape, and loaded and ran a “Hello World” program written in FORTRAN-II. We believe that this is the only running PDP-9 on the planet.
We still need to repair the paper tape punch, one of the TU55 DECtape drives, and the TU20 magnetic tape drive. We plan to add EAE and 34H graphics so we can run Spacewar! The long term goal is to get UNIX V0 running on this system.
It looks like the restoration is being documented on this page: DEC PDP-9, System Number 319
RIP Nick Higham. He was a prolific numerical analyst who implemented algorithms for the NAG library and Matlab. He had an excellent blog on numerical analysis. He presented code in Matlab – it would be interesting to translate it to Modern Fortran. Some Fortran-related posts of his are
Very sad to read that. He was a remarkable numerical expert, indeed. He was actually my age, even a few months younger.
The fact that it is Burns Night reminded me of possibly my favourite ever paper: “The integration of GIS, remote sensing, expert systems and adaptive co-kriging for environmental habitat modeling of the Highland Haggis using object-oriented, fuzzy-logic and neural-network techniques”
Upon a quick re-read to mark the occasion, I spotted this in the Appendix! Perhaps if it was spelt “Fortran” it would have got a positive trendiness rating.
The core of Curcic’s research has been trying to understand the interplay between the atmosphere and the ocean. Scientists have generally focused on one or the other, creating models to understand each. Scientists have also studied the formation of waves to better predict everything from tsunamis to boating conditions. But Curcic was always confused by that approach since all three influence each other in constant, profound ways. The temperature of the water influences how much humidity is in the air above it. The speed of winds influences the direction and size of waves, which in turn influence the ocean currents underneath. So, Curcic blended them all together and—combined with his computer programming expertise—developed models that can explain what’s happening in all three areas.
…
Curcic never earned a degree in computer programming, but he’s become an expert in the field, especially in Fortran. He became well- known by publishing his open source work through his blog, including a series of code he wrote that serves as a bridge between machine learning, which is mostly coded using Python, and earth system models, which have traditionally been written in Fortran. That’s why Curcic was approached by a book publisher who felt it was time for a new Fortran book for beginners that uses hands-on examples to teach the decades-old language. “Modern Fortran: Building Efficient Parallel Applications” was published in 2020.
Thanks for sharing!
MFC, featured in this article, is a Fortran code.
Group Optimizes Fluid Dynamics Simulator on World’s Fastest Supercomputer
by Bryant Wine
Georgia Tech
November 22, 2023
The team used the hackathon to refine MFC, making it more capable for medical, aeronautical, and defense applications.
MFC simulates compressible multiphase flows, a key issue in many engineering problems. MFC’s high quality simulations help engineers improve technologies.
Potential applications include:
- Needle-free drug injection
- Improved artificial heart pumps and valves
- Erosion-resistant aircraft surfaces
- Quieter submarines
These simulations require a blend of software, like MFC, and the largest supercomputers the government can bring to bear.
“MFC is a versatile solver that accounts for flavors of fluid flows like acoustics, surface tension, phase change, high Mach shock waves, and so on,” said Bryngelson, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).
“MFC has other tricks. We can model solid and porous materials, which have been applied to simulations of the breakup of kidney stones for new lithotripsy therapies.”
Fortran is a fine name for a programming language, but MANIAC (Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer Model) would have been even better
I’m trying to find a fortran ascii art program circa 1973-1977. Using overprinting, the program printed a pattern similar to basket weaving.
The weaving pattern was small and dense in one corner of the page, and the pattern grew as it expanded outward from that corner.
This was in the spirit of Frederick Hammersley art but I haven’t found anything related in his works or any other vintage ascii art. As I recall, the program was small and mathematical; I typed it in from a printout. The source code possibly came from University of Florida but that’s vague.
Any possible clues or starting points? Thanks!!
If no one here has them, you might want to check with the Hercules emulator folk and the CBT tapes. Hercules has several forums on groups.io. CBT is at https://cbttape.org/.
Me, I would love to find an old VM/CMS subwar game that I think was in Fortran. So far, no luck.
VM/CMS? That brings back happy memories of an age that was so much simpler
I’ve run both it and MVS 3.8J on my old Windows desktop easily.
You know, block mode terminals really were more than sufficient for programming.
@Arjen may have happy memories of VM/CMS but I don’t. Disk space was very limited, and tapes were big and heavy, but the Fortran compiler insisted that every line of the program had to be exactly 80 characters long. So I kept my programs in lines of variable length, copied them to length 80 just before compiling, and deleted the copies just afterwards.
Dijkstra on Fortran in his 1972 ACM Turing Lecture (EWD340):
The second major development on the software scene that I would like to mention is the birth of FORTRAN. At that time this was a project of great temerity and the people responsible for it deserve our great admiration. It would be absolutely unfair to blame them for shortcomings that only became apparent after a decade or so of extensive usage: groups with a successful look-ahead of ten years are quite rare! In retrospect we must rate FORTRAN as a successful coding technique, but with very few effective aids to conception, aids which are now so urgently needed that time has come to consider it out of date. The sooner we can forget that FORTRAN has ever existed, the better, for as a vehicle of thought it is no longer adequate: it wastes our brainpower, is too risky and therefore too expensive to use. FORTRAN’s tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes. I pray daily that more of my fellow-programmers may find the means of freeing themselves from the curse of compatibility.
What are your thoughts? Has programming been liberated with Python, Julia, and other higher-level languages? Is generative AI like ChatGPT an effective conception aid for succesful coding, or will it lead us down an even more tragic fate?
Alan Perlis (the first Turing award winner) also made several statements on Fortran. From Epigrams in Programming (originally published in ACM SIGPLAN),
- You can measure a programmer’s perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
- Though the Chinese should adore APL, it’s FORTRAN they put their money on.
(the other epigrams are better if you ask me)
Perlis has also been attributed the quote,
“FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed — it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.”
however in 10 mins of googling I haven’t been able to pinpoint any written source.
I find the quote kind of fitting in that weeds are also a pioneer species, and can also be beneficial, despite lacking some of the flair other languages (flowers) might have. The benefit Fortran gives is being able to tap deep into the computers performance, which may otherwise go wasted in (shallow) interpreted languages.
Alan J. Perlis, Introduction to Computer Science, (1975) page 231
There is a copy here that can be borrowed to view the page of interest.
There is an earlier reference in Ralston, Anthony; Fortran and the first course in computer science, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, Volume 3, Issue 4, pp 24–29 (1971) https://doi.org/10.1145/382214.382499
Whenever I see remarks like the above, I’m reminded of a quote attributed to (the now late) Professor Tinsley Oden told to me by one of his colleagues. Professor Oden was one of the giants and pioneers of Finite Element Analysis as well as Computational Mechanics and other disciplines that ranged from CFD to medicine. A tribute published by the University of Texas institute that bears his name can be found here.
I was fortunate to get to work for a brief time with Professor Oden and his group during the early 2000s and found him to be the epitomy of the phrase “A scholar and a gentleman”. The quote was about people who liked to call themselves “Computational Scientists”. Paraphrasing, Professor Oden said “They should find a better name to call themselves. For the most part very few do computations and even fewer do science”
More epigrams from Alan Perlis. Epigrams on programming (Sep 1982) ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Issue 9, pp 7–13 https://doi.org/10.1145/947955.1083808
One I take to heart is:
You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
We can extend the analogy of weeds and beautiful flowers even further:
- Weeds grow by themselves, are indeed often pioneers and more importantly do not need pesticides. And for the gourmet ecologists among us, they contribute a lot to the biodiversity of their habitat.
- In my country we have many farmers who grow beautiful flowers, like tulips and lilies and peonies to name but a few, but that is only possible by the use of large quantities of pesticides. Whether that is due to the way the plants are grown - a lot together, no room for other species - or inherent to the type of plant, is not something I explored much.