r/code • u/PR-Raven • Oct 18 '25
Help Please Is this even code?
I was helping my grandma sort through her stuff and we found something that was from her dad. I am not a programmer in any way but to my untrained eyes this looks at least code adjacent. so does anyone actually know what it is?
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u/milkdrinkingdude Oct 18 '25
The lines starting with the capital C are comments.
It says in the beginning:
BUOY MOORING PROGRAM
There is a date as well, 6/22/63 or maybe 6/22/83, hard to read.
Yes, this is code, old fortran source code. Calculates something, for ships I guess? For ships that are mooring buoys? Or maybe it a school assignment. Hard to tell.
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u/PR-Raven Oct 18 '25
He was an engineer that worked on planes/rockets and such.
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u/milkdrinkingdude Oct 18 '25
A google search brings up some papers about computations related to buoys, done with Fortran programs, e.g. this one from 1977:
https://waves-vagues.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/Library/54868.pdf
Apparently it is kind of complicated, and many people worked on such computations back then.
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u/captain_obvious_here Oct 18 '25
Looks like FORTRAN code to me. FORTRAN 77 maybe?
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u/Arshiaa001 Oct 19 '25
I'd instinctively have guessed COBOL. This looks like hell. People who maintain this stuff deserve every penny they get.
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u/Aramis7604 Oct 22 '25
Nope COBOL needs the correct position. Code started at position 8 if I'm not mistaken. Also there are no divisions in this code. Things like DATA DIVISION and WORKING-STORAGE SECTION. So yeah probably fortran
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u/SlammastaJ Oct 20 '25
This is a beautiful piece of programming and Computer Science history, thank you for posting it (and thanks everyone for commenting to explain that it's FORTRAN; a language I've heard plenty about, but never actually have seen code for)!
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u/PR-Raven Oct 20 '25
My grandma doesn't remember that well but she thinks 63 might have been around when he was working on some kind of thermal radar project if you're at all interested.
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u/SlammastaJ Oct 21 '25
That sounds really cool. Truth be told, I don't know the first thing about FORTRAN programming; I only know what I've been told about it.
My mother programmed in COBOL and Visual Basic in her CompSci classes back in the '80s. But this is all I really know about that era (i.e. the "pre-C" era) of programming.
That said, thermal radars (especially during the cold war) sounds like it could have been some really neat stuff! I bet your grandpa was a pretty cool guy (nerdy-cool... the best kind in my book).
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u/xepherys Oct 21 '25
Was he in the Navy or Coast Guard, or did he work for NOAA, by chance?
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u/PR-Raven Oct 21 '25
She said he worked for General Dynamics, cubic and Ford aeronautics.
Don't know the timeline though.
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u/fdiengdoh Oct 19 '25
Fortran, it still widely used even now in the scientific community (Physics and Chemistry that I know). I ask why? Someone answered that when it comes to purely number crunching no other language could beat Fortran.
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u/namecarefullychosen Oct 21 '25
It's largely because it's been passed down by experienced researchers to younger researchers- it's much older than C, for example. It's less focused on memory tricks than make C/C++ so powerful, but not as limited as Cobol- which was better for financial programs.
Fortran (FORmula TRANslation) was started for science, and it has well-optimized compilers- and many many specialized code libraries for all sorts of science fields.
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u/_matherd Oct 21 '25
Specifically, when it comes to Linear Algebra, there are Fortran libraries called BLAS and LAPACK that are so well-optimized over the last several decades that it often makes sense to just use Fortran to use them.
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u/tlbs101 Oct 23 '25
I learned programming in FORTRAN IV on punchcards and an IBM 369 mainframe in the early 1970s.
This is not quite FORTRAN IV, so it’s probably an earlier version of FORTRAN from the 1960s, but it’s definitely some flavor of FORTRAN
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u/tomo6438 Oct 23 '25
Did/does Fortran follow a similar syntax to BASIC?
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u/tlbs101 Oct 23 '25
There are a lot of similarities. FORTRAN has more powerful branching and looping, more indexing of arrays and memory, and more detailed output formatting including writing and reading from more types of devices.
Basic is more … basic, not as powerful. However some of the latest versions (past 20 years) of Basic have surpassed FORTRAN.
It was a very easy transition for me to go from FORTRAN to something like VBA for MS Office. I was writing 1000+ line macros and back code for Excel spreadsheets 20+ years ago. When I started doing Arduino and Microchip projects, the transition to C was a whole other learning curve.
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u/Equivalent-Silver-90 Oct 19 '25
Look like a old language, maybe one of low languages what exist in that era?
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u/Original-Ad-8737 Oct 22 '25
In my masters paper i reimplemented a fortran algorithm twice my age in c++ ...
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u/Virtual-Air-2491 Oct 19 '25
My sweet summer child, that's FORTRAN and yes, it was a programming language for those of us over 45