Forty years … forty bloomin years .. not a Beatles “forty years ago today” but forty years ago this year … forty years ago (get the message) this year that I wrote my first computer program .. the year I became a programmer, 1969 at the age of 14 in a gap between maths O-level (taken a couple of terms early to allow us to take Additional Maths later .. dull huh) and the end of term … imagine this …

A new, young maths master, fresh down from Imperial College to a classroom at Christ’s Hospital, decides to entertain the troops with a bit of modern thinking … “Let’s write computer programs” … or as they were then “programmes” 😉

So armed with punched cards (with pre-perforated chad bits), some coding sheets and a sharp pencil we set about it … this was my epiphany, my road to Damascus moment … after a lifetime of being rotten at languages (and having tried Latin, French and German as well as English!) I came across a language I could not only understand but could also love …… FORTRAN !!

My first program had a job title (remember those) of “Cucumber Patch” and took around 30 cards. All put into an elastic band and sent, by post, to the Imperial College batch service. A week later we were scouring through reams of fan-fold line printer paper avidly devouring the error messages!

Eventually, after a few weeks, “Cucumber Patch” ran to completion and produced lots of paper with Sine and Cosine graphs on drawn in ‘X’s .. thus I’d learned about output, arrays, trig functions, looping, gosh damn it all those exciting things with such power – remember the GOTO?!

Later, when Uni beckoned, my main interests were HiFi related so I went to The Univeristy of Essex to do electronics, “TV and Audio Engineering” to be specific. One term in I found that electronics had too much calculus for me but that the Uni had a big IBM and some small PDP8s …. what joy, I switched!

And so, three years later I earned myself a 2ii BA (Yep, ARTS!) in “Computer and Communications Engineering” and went off to be a pilot … something I soon stopped switching back to electronics and programming …

Since then I have programmed in many things from wire and solder to fourth generation languages (where did they go!) and worked on missile guidance in 64bit machine code, assembler code, Algol, Coral, Basic, Fortran, ASP, PHP, Perl, Prolog, Javascript, LISP (shudder) … well, anything that came along though some would say I’m simpky a multi-lingual Fortran programmer … the GOTOs are gone but the simple linear structure is still there .. I was still there when Fortran 2000 came out and was a founder of the Fortran Futures meetings, I’ve worked on the ISO standards committee and Fortran based web (and gopher!) sites and even compilers and tools (Toolpack, that was largely my area) …

Anyway, thought I’d share that .. can’t be many programmers around with 40 years experience and still oevr 10 years to go till retirement .. wait .. that’s not such a good thing ;-(