- THE HISTORY OF FORTRAN I, II, AND III (computerhistory.org)
Before 1954 almost all programming was done in machine language or assembly language. Programmers rightly regarded their work as a complex, creative art that required human inventiveness to produce an efficient program. Much of their effort was devoted to overcoming the difficulties created by the computers of that era: the lack of index registers, the lack of built-in floating point operations, restricted instruction sets (which might have AND but not OR, for example), and primitive input-output arrangements. Given the nature of computers, the services which “automatic programming” performed for the programmer were concerned with overcoming the machine’s shortcomings. Thus the primary concern of some “automatic programming” systems was to allow the use of symbolic addresses and decimal numbers (e.g., the MIDAC Input Translation Program [Brown and Carr 1954]).
- Oscar Wilde (Wikipedia)
Oscar Fingal O’Fflahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.