Abstracting Away the Machine: The History of the FORTRAN Programming Language (FORmula TRANslation) Paperback – August 22, 2019

I love computer history. Unfortunately, about 10 years ago, I hit a plateau.I had read every book, I knew every anecdote about Jobs and Wozniak, I'd gotten a private tour of the Computer History Museum, I'd hung out with Al Alcorn and Nolan Bushnell at a reception. Basically, without becoming a historian myself, and doing real research on primary sources, I really felt like there wasn't much more about the history of computing I could learn. Either because I'd read the books, or because (starting in the 80s and 90s) I'd lived it and it wasn't history, it was just memory.I still go to museums and lectures -- Living Computer Museum in Seattle is tremendous, as is Computer History Museum -- because you can always learn more, but I didn't really feel like I was progressing dramatically, nor was I too interested in the kind of hardware/artifact fetishism of the collecting community that's kind of the traditional path for nerds into vintage tech.Enter Mark Lorenzo.With his definitive book on BASIC, and even moreso this book on FORTRAN, Mark is exploring, discovering, and presenting deep, well written accounts of essential, "undiscovered" computer history and I feel like I am really learning again. I love it.This book is well written, fairly well laid out for a self-published effort (margins are a bit narrow, but the font is more readable than the BASIC book -- these Lulu print-on-demand books don't always do great with kerning or thin fonts), and utterly fascinating. We learn the story, we learn the personalities, we learn the context, and he provides just enough technical information to keep it interesting without so much that it becomes a coding manual.It's just an amazing piece of work, whether you're just getting into computer history, or you're a jaded old timer like me! I have his cardboard computers book up against a new old stock vintage Cardiac on my shelf and I can't wait to get into that next.

A review should tell you whether you will find a book to be good, not whether it is good on some absolute scale. Usually they are the same thing, but in this case, they are not.This is a very good book if you want to know everything there is to know about how FORTRAN came about. That is one kind of history. For most of us, though, a history should tell us the story about what is important. If you want to write a history of FORTRAN that tells a story with a point, this book would be an excellent source for you, but it is too much for a casual reader.It would be an excellent book if it told the story of what a genius John Backus was. FORTRAN was the first high level programming language. The insight that everything not essential to what the programmer was trying to achieve was profound and extremely non-obvious. Looking back, it is hard to imagine a world in which that was controversial or that abstracting the machine was a good thing. But that was what had to be overcome.I bought to book to learn about that and one other thing. How did John Backus come up with the idea that grammar productions, an idea from linguistics, could be applied to compiler construction? Alas, that came out of is his work on Algol, so it is ignored here. Such a book would be a different book, so it is unfair to complain that this should be included. But that is the book I wanted to read. The detail on who the players all were at every stage of the game is mind-numbingly complete, but I learned nothing about the achievement that I personally consider even greater than FORTRAN.So, get this book if you want to know the story of development of FORTRAN, the whole story, and nothing but that story. Be aware of exactly what you are getting, because it is a long book.

The book is easy to read and gives a great historical account of computing in the earliest days.

Enjoyable read of a particular aspect of computing history. Seems fairly comprehensive.The production leaves something to be desired - the page margins are slim, giving the book a cheap feel.

Interesting to read about the history. Enjoyed the book.

This book contains a lot of information. Unfortunately it’s not a useful as it might be because it contains no index or footnotes. Material is quoted that is only vaguely attributed. It does contain a list of resources used.In addition, there are times when the author seems confused (or perhaps writes confusingly) on minor points that are jarring to a knowledgeable reader. I’m giving it four stars for the amount of material and readable style.

One way to check that your deck of punched cards was in the correct order was to draw a diagonal line across the top of the deck."The use of spaces between words began in about the 10th century AD, and ended in 1957 with FORTRAN."

The cover is meant to copy IBM's first Fortran manual.Same color and font.Recommend the paperback.

Mycket bra bok om hur Fortran skapades och utvecklades fram till idag. Även hur det har påverkan andra högnivå programmeringsspråk och datautvecklingen i allmänhet.Jag var själv med och skrev program i assembler i slutet av 1970-talet och vilken stor förbättring det var med Fortran även på mindre 8-bit Mikrodatorsystem.

Heute sind Computer überall im Einsatz, aber bis dahin war es ein langer und schwieriger Weg. Dieses Buch beschreibt einen der wichtigsten Meilensteine. In den Anfangstagen der Computer war Programmieren eine Geheimwissenschaft. Ein Team bei IBM schaffte es, das Programmieren so radikal zu vereinfachen, dass es einer viel größeren Gruppe von Menschen zugänglich wurde. Man kann sagen, das Programmieren wurde einer Priesterschaft entrissen und demokratisiert. Außerdem wurde die Zeit zur Fehlersuche und -behebung radikal verkürzt.Über diesen Meilenstein, einen der wichtigsten auf dem Weg zur Digitalisierung, berichtet dieses Buch auf spannende und technisch kompetente Weise.

Lorenzo has made a very significant contribution to computing literature, and I have no hesitation in recommending his book both to students, who will learn what life was like in the pioneering days, and to those who will find in it a lively account of parts of their own professional lives.This is a book that tells an important story in a brisk style, and is a ‘good read’, spanning a time period from the lifetime of Ada Lady Lovelace right up to the adoption of Fortran 2018. It concludes with a long list of ‘Resources’ but, sadly, it lacks an Index (hence the missing fifth star). The author has clearly had access to a mine of historical sources, most significantly at the Computer History Museum in California, which has been well supplied with Fortran documentation.The book contains a very well researched and detailed account of Fortran’s gestation, and Lorenzo goes to some lengths to point out that Backus’s principle insight, in 1954, was that the real challenge lay not in the language design, which was carried out in a fairly ad hoc fashion, but in the design and implementation of the various phases of the first compiler. Here, new techniques that today we take for granted had to be invented from scratch, an example being the parsing of expressions. It was the clear success of Backus's team in this area that led to the subsequent spread of the language. And it's still going strong.