Everyday Technology

Written  September 5, 2013 One of the oldest programming languages, the Fortran programming language known mainly for its strength in numeric and scientific computation, was developed in the 1950′s and first published in 1957 by IBM in San Jose California as the first known high level programming language. Fortran came about at a time where programmers only had the opportunity to create programs using assembly and machine code which came with several downfalls such as it was: long and tedius to write quite bug prone very hard to debug code that was written was architecture dependent thus not portable now with the rise of Fortran, programers were able to write code at a much faster rate giving the programmer a lot more time to focus on solving problems than on the code being written. It was a true innovation in its day, being credited with the creation of the branch of computer science known today as the compiler theory. Over the years Fortran has seen significant chang

Written December 27, 2013 The discussion about the death of the desktop has been raging for a while now. In fact in 2010 the death of the PC was predicted to have occurred by 2013. It is now the end of 2013 and a new timeline will have to be declared. There still remains plenty of doom and gloom but I doubt the PC will become extinct anytime soon. What we are seeing is an evolution to small form factors. Single purpose machine used to take up an entire room and even grew to entire basements as they became more complex. They were replaced by cabinet size machines, then table sized then eventually the ‘big iron’ that now sits on our desk as desktop PCs. The laptop was supposed to be the first real threat to the desktop, then the ultra-thins and minis now we have tablets and cellphones leading the charge. Will we see the death of the PC? I believe that we will in some way, but not right now. In the first instance we need to consider need, then processing power and finally technolog