. . . And I use “geek” in the complimentary sense.

Here is an entertaining local post about the creator of the computer programming language, FORTRAN, including an amusing outtake from a FORTRAN manual.

For those of us who still sometimes get hung up on exactly what is meant by “right-click,“ the folks who can write instructions that make computers, you know, do things—who can actually create the programs that we mortals can barely operate—are on the level of shamans. They have strange, magical powers. We need them, and we’re a little afraid of them.

The post also contains a link to the highly interesting Wikipedia history of FORTRAN.

Thanks Bart and Patrick. This is good.

How about pre-Fortran?

The rarefied world of early 20th-century mathematics seems light years away from today’s PCs and virtual-reality video games. Yet it was a 1936 paper by Cambridge University mathematician Alan M. Turing that laid the foundation for the electronic wonders now crowding into every corner of modern life…Turing invoked the notion of a “universal machine” that could be given instructions to perform a variety of tasks. Turing spoke of a “machine” only abstractly, as a sequence of steps to be executed. But his realization that the data fed into a system also could function as its directions opened the door to the invention of software. “He is the one who found the underlying reason why an automatic calculating device can do so many things,“...Turing didn’t live to see the revolution he unleashed. But he left an enormous legacy. In 1950 he proposed a bold measure for machine intelligence: If a person could hold a typed conversation with “somebody” else, not realizing that a computer was on the other end of the wire, then the machine could be deemed intelligent. Since 1990 an annual contest has sought a computer that can pass this “Turing Test.“ Nobody has yet taken the $100,000 purse. Turing would no doubt be delighted that engineers the world over are still trying.  BusWeek Innovators Series.

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