Some users will have noticed HELP C LANGUAGE HISTORY: this is all about BCPL because bits of BCPL were based on an adaptation of original material related to an idea that thirty-five people in Cambridge once had, some of whom are now rich and famous, and because the authors of C are rumoured to have read the BCPL manual and enthusiastically said that it was "not a bad language if you like that sort of thing".
It has therefore been decided to implement HELP FORTRAN LANGUAGE HISTORY, in order to complete the story of Cambridge's past glories.
One day in the early 1950s, in Cambridge, Wheeler, Wilkes and Hartley wrote the prototype of FORTRAN, known as COFFEE (Cambridge's Original Formula and Functional Expression Evaluator). COFFEE was the language designed to run on the large TITANIC computer (which unfortunately crashed whenever the water coolant froze). The original features of COFFEE, which have been copied many times over, were the DO LOOP (Wheeler) (earlier languages forced the user to input a separate card for every line to be executed, so that any computation lasting more than a few seconds required special vans to load the cards in), the SUBROUTINE (Wilkes) (earlier languages had implemented this by requesting the programmer to "go and work this bit out yourself, then turn on some of the switches") and the STOP (Hartley) (earlier programs were aborted by turning the power off at the mains).
One day an executive from an obscure typewriter company called International Business Machines was passing through the tea room and saw COFFEE. He instantly stole all the best bits, renamed the language FORTRAN, and made his fortune, while the original brilliant authors starved in poverty.
Things developed slowly but eventually FORTRAN 66 came along, so called because it appeared in 1968. Then, in the 70s, IBM decided to go along to Professor Wheeler's lectures to find out the latest ideas in computer programming. Unfortunately their agents could only understand the first two lectures, but they incorporated lots of revolutionary new ideas into a language which they called FORTRAN 77, because it was released in 1979.
After overhearing a telephone conversation in the Computer Laboratory, IBM realised that there was still some way to go. The long-awaited "NARTROF" compiler for the language C (named after Alan Narmon and Arthur Mytrof) is almost certainly about to be copied, written backwards, and renamed FORTRAN 8x.
Jonathan Partington, October 1988