I suggest that further messages in this thread consider only the technical contributions of von Neumann (or the general topic of Anecdotal Fortran).
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The models to forecast tornadoes are probably in Fortran.
They Said the Tornado Would Hit at 9:30. It Hit at 9:30.
By Thomas Fuller and Tariro Mzezewa
New York Times
Dec. 14, 2021
…
Weather prediction technology has become so precise in recent years that tornadoes are almost always foreseen, a vast, if somewhat unheralded, improvement in forecasting.
In the late 1980s, before the use of Doppler radar and other technologies, meteorologists were able to issue warnings for 46 of 88 violent tornadoes in the United States, or just more than half, federal data shows. In recent years, powerful tornadoes have been preceded by warnings 97 percent of the time.
…
The huge strides in tornado prediction rates have been made possible by a cascade of scientific advances. The introduction of Doppler radar in the 1990s and subsequent upgrades allowed forecasters to measure the wind inside of a storm, to distinguish between rain, snow or hail and to see and predict the formation of tornadoes. The proliferation of weather satellites allows scientists even more visibility into the formation of storms — and, crucially, the conditions that might create a tornado. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration operates 16 satellites.
The deluge of data from these technologies is crunched and modeled in real time by some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
“In many ways the tornado warning system — and everything that leads up to it — is one of the most incredible success stories in applied science,” Mr. Brooks said. “We don’t miss violent tornadoes essentially ever now.”
Before Doppler was deployed to predict tornadoes, the best the authorities could do was rely on a more primitive form of radar and a small army of weather spotters communicating by ham radio.
The consequences of the leaps in technology have been clear, researchers say.
“Tornado fatality rates have dropped off the map,” Mr. Strader, the Villanova professor, said.
Research by Mr. Strader shows that the number of people killed by tornadoes in the United States decreased steadily from 1920, when there were 2.3 fatalities per one million people, to 1990, when there were .25 fatalities per million.
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The FORTRAN I compiler will be featured in Chapter 5 of Top 10 Algorithms of the 20th Century, Computational Sciences Course, Kyoritsu Shuppan co., ltd.
The book will be published in January 2022.
Other algorithms are as follows:
- Monte Carlo method
- Linear programming algorithm
- Krylov subspace method for linear equations
- Decomposition approach to matrix computation
- QR method
- Quicksort
- FFT
- Integer relation detection
- FMM
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From The birth of the Soviet missile defense system. Pros and cons of BESM-6:
In 1967, as part of a contract for the purchase of a CDC-1604 computer, I was sent to Germany together with engineers A. Karlov and V. Mirolyubov to study at the European center of the CDC firm in Frankfurt am Main. After studying the computer operating system and programming in the FORTRAN language, I did an internship for another two months at the CDC-1604 operator in Hanover. As a result, I worked as a senior mathematician at CDC-1604 for a year after installing this computer in the LCTA and, in addition, learned spoken English. In 1969-1970 and 1973. at CERN he was studying the system of control and calibration programs for the Spiral Reader scanning machine, similar to that developed at LCTA.
[…]
The main purpose of the trip was to conclude contracts for the purchase of the CDC-6200 computer, bypassing the infamous COCOM agreement aimed at banning the supply of the latest computer technologies to socialist countries. Agreeing to a permanent inspection by KOCOM in Dubna, the LVTA directorate in 1972 obtained permission to purchase the CDC-6200. Such machines of the 6000 series belonged to powerful computers, there were many application programs for them in the CERN library, and although the 6200 was already quite outdated, such a purchase allowed LVTA in 1974 to develop the machine to the CDC-6400, and the next year to the multiprocessor CDC-6500. Together with BESM-6, this dramatically increased the computing power of JINR, made it possible to create an extensive terminal network and launch fortran stations.
[…]
Two BESM-6s were easily put into one hall 200 m, the plotter Digi graph was connected. They practically abandoned magnetic tapes, switching to disks and installing ARFA software (archive-file system). To download programs written in Fortran, we connected a PC, installed Kermit. Users received their program texts on a floppy disk
[…]
The stolen Fortran and Algol-60 compilers, much later LISP and Pascal, were successfully used for it, but all this at the cost of hellish efforts. Algol-60 was originally created at the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the Programming Laboratory under the leadership of V.M. Kurochkin, first for BESM-2, later ported to BESM-6 (for BESM-4 there were at least 3 different compilers with Algol-60, not less than 2 different assemblers, Dubninsky and Bayakovsky and a compiler from the original Epsilon language - this is such a typical zoo), and as many said, it remained for her the only non-stick translator from the popular language.
[…]
Many programs appeared after familiarization with foreign source codes, for example, the already mentioned N.N. Govorun from LVT JINT, after a trip to CERN using machine printouts with CDC 3200 made in their computer center, implemented six BESMs on BESM-6 Fortran and libraries of standard programs -6 were transferred to the GDR, and their programmers from JINR, having gone to their homeland, made their own version of the assembler, Fortran-GDR and Algol-GDR (which worked 20-30% faster than domestic ones).
[…]
The BESM-6 file system was never written and completed to the end, in general, in each scientific center it was possible to write something of its own to the detriment of everything else. In Chelyabinsk, there was archiving on tapes, in Dubna - the human language for describing tasks from both Fortran-GDR and Algol-GDR, at the VMK MSU - LISP and DISPAK.
(COCOM: western export controls during Cold War; Dubna: nuclear research town near Moscow; GDR: German Democratic Republic)
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From Hacker News:
GCC: The customer has nuclear weapons. They do not do “bounty”
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The entire discourse around the missing IEEE arithmetic routine at the GCC bugzilla thread followed by the Hacker News one is horrible in several ways.
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Jeff Atwood writes that BASIC Computer Games (1978) and More basic computer games (1979) by David Ahl introduced many children to programming in that era. There is a site on Fortran computer games with Fortran 77 translations of Ahl’s programs and links to Early Computer Games in FORTRAN. Atwood created a GitHub collaboration to implement Ahl’s games in eight
memory safe, general purpose scripting languages:
- Java
- Python
- C#
- VB.NET
- JavaScript
- Ruby
- Delphi / Object Pascal
- Perl
The list of languages is fixed, but Atwood suggests that versions in other languages can use topic basic-computer-games for separate repos. Maybe someone can start a Fortran effort. His repo says
- These are very old games . They date from the mid-70s so they’re not exactly examples of what kids (or anyone, really?) would be playing these days. Consider them more like classic programming exercises to teach programming. We’re paying it forward by converting them into modern languages, so the next generation can learn from the programs in this classic book – and compare implementations across common modern languages.
GitHub has a Fortran Gaming channel.
Unrelated: Shafik Yaghmour has some interesting tweets about the book Abstracting Away the Machine: The History of the FORTRAN Programming Language (2019) by Mark Jones Lorenzo.
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I really wish I know enough Japanese to read this. Or maybe that can be my new year’s resolution for this year.
FORTRAN is available in most of those virtual machines:
The Nostalgic Computing Center is a network of virtual computer systems from the 1970’s, 1980’s, and early 1990’s. The systems are iconic supercomputers, mainframes, and minicomputers from that classic era of computing history. Here, you may experience for yourself the souls of these awe-inspiring machines.
The diagram, below, depicts the topology of the network and shows how the machines comprising it are interconnected using data communication technologies of the era. Click on any node in the diagram to reveal details about the respective machine and access links enabling you to login and learn more about it. After logging into a machine, you may interact with its programming languages, networking capabilities, and other unique features. Click on any edge in the diagram to reveal information about the respective data communication technology.
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Re “Encyclopedia Professor Fortran (Russian)”: It is a little difficult to read since the translation appears to have been made without human supervision.
For example, the 4th sentence says, “And I, transfixed, staring at the strange mysterious car standing on the desks.” Presumably, the word “car” is the translation for “машина”, which can mean “machine”, “engine”, “car”, “computer”, “apparatus”, etc.
I was about to post a replay about this but @ivanpribec was way faster. If you look closely at my FML video, you will see a bottle of “Olde Fortran” liquor rotating. I found it so funny that has to be included somewhere. Ahh, the old liquors just get better over the time… 
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This is how scientists of the 1950s expected the home computer of the 21th century would look like. Note what the programming language was expected to be:
Source: here, although I am sure you will find that picture elsewhere.
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I love how they put in a 1980s-era DECwriter as the “teletype”.
The picture is obviously fake, the huge steering wheel and the “teletype” which is out of place and time make it obvious. Similar pictures were rather popular on the web in the 90s. The linked website claims this particular one is in fact the maneuvering room console of a submarine, and that sounds way more believable to me. They forgot to make it more funny by claiming the steering wheel is there to manually switch punching card stacks. 
But they didn’t forget to make it more “believable” by mentioning Fortran. Which reminds me, I am tired of reading posts here and there claiming Fortran is “obsolete”, “ancient”, and the like. People saying such things obviously have no idea what they are talking about; in the best case, they had a class of Fortran 77 sometime ago in the college (for some reason, several colleges kept teaching Fortran 77 years after Fortran 90 reached a compiler-supporting state). So they heard about Fortran 77 and they think that’s Fortran today as well.
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I fear it may be worse than that: they have heard these opinions of people who have seen FORTRAN 77 or even FORTRAN 4 at some point in their education, probably as an example of how not to program, and they simply repeat these opinions.
(But then I have heard such opinions about other languages as well - simply because the people spreading these opinions were not familiar with the programming language in question and it definitely was not identical to their favourite. Oops, I sound cynical and this is a thread about humour)
I found a website sometime ago, created by someone who was starting a campain to “eliminate Fortran” - or “boycott Fortran”, or he used a similar term, I don’t remember exactly. Hard to believe, I know, but true. He even had a “FAQ” section, with questions and answers about why Fortran must be eliminated. I tried to find that webpage but I couldn’t… sadly. It would make a nice post.
It was the PETITION TO RETIRE FORTRAN. Naturally it was not welcomed on comp.lang.fortran.
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