
A history of the first practical programming language Fortran - whinvik
https://twitter.com/WhinerVikram/status/1307289863960621057
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eesmith
"And a bug was literally a real, physical bug!! In the wires." ... I think
that's supposed to be a reference to an incident which happened with the
Harvard Mark II, also known as Aiken Relay Calculator. Not the ENIAC. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug#History)
.

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whinvik
Thanks. For some reason I always associated that with ENIAC.

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eesmith
For all I know, ENIAC had (insect) bugs too!

My favorite old machine is the SEAC. First electronically stored program
computer in the US (as I recall), and actively used in a variety of fields.
Minksy learned to program on it, the first video image was made on it, it was
an early (if not first) networked computer to DYSEC, its "portable" cousin.
And it was actively shopped it around to different government organizations,
to see if it could be applied to all sorts of different areas, so generated
some of the foundational papers for a number of fields.

