Since I am unable to locate the title or a copy of the book I owned on Fortran IV in 1972, here is a sampling of other books on Fortran IV from that era:
I just had to get this book because of its psychedelic '60s style cover with the '60s style checkbook font that was so popular back then. This book is application-oriented, so FORTRAN syntax and grammar are discussed only sparingly, there is no appendix for such details, and the material is not very logically organized by one topic per chapter. Below is a sampling of pages from this book, especially key pages that mention important points of syntax.
front cover, exterior
...
p. ix
p. x
p. xi
p. xii
p. 1 (Chapter 1)
p. 2
p. 3
p. 4 [Fortran IV history]
p. 5 (Chapter 2)
p. 6 [flowcharts]
p. 7 (Chapter 3)
p. 8 [variables]
p. 9 [coding sheets]
p. 10
p. 11
p. 12 (Chapter 4)
p. 13
p. 14
p. 15
p. 16 (Chapter 5)
p. 17
p. 18
p. 19
p. 20
p. 21 (Chapter 6) [Hollerith information]
p. 22
p. 23 [GO TO statement]
p. 24
p. 25
p. 26
p. 27 [slash]
...
p. 30 (Chapter 7) [arithmetic operators]
p. 31
...
p. 33
p. 34
...
p. 39 (Chapter 8) [3-way IF statement]
p. 40
...
p. 48
...
p. 56 (Chapter 14) [FLOAT function]
...
p. 64 ( Chapter 19) [DO loops]
p. 65
...
p. 78
p. 79
...
p. 81 [dimensions]
p. 82 (Chapter 23)
...
p. 86 (Chapter 25) [logical type]
p. 87
p. 88
...
p. 92 (Chapter 26) [IF statement]
p. 93 [DATA statement]
p. 94
...
p. 97 (Chapter 27) [complex numbers]
p. 98
...
p. 102 (Chapter 30) [double precision]
p. 103
...
p. 112 (Chapter 35) ["A" format]
p. 113 (Chapter 36) [subroutines]
p. 114
...
p. 124 (Chapter 41) [COMMON statement]
p. 125
...
rear cover, outer
After learning BASIC in our high school summer school class in 1971, I became an enthusiastic writer of programs and began to hang out in our high school's new computer lab in most of my spare hours, along with several other computer enthusiasts. One day in 1972, I believe in the fall, one of these students mentioned to me that a group of them was going to take a free course on FORTRAN in downtown San Diego, given at nights in a business building (I believe IBM), and asked if I wanted to join them. Of course I accepted.
At the beginning of that class we were each given a book on their version of FORTRAN, a book I thought was free, but was later told I had to pay for. (This was an early indication of a poorly run course.) This book was a softcover book with a dark hue (brown, black, or gray), with a very glossy, photo-like cover. I believe it also had glossy pages. It had an extensive appendix of the math functions and the formulas the compiler used to compute those functions, which is the part of the book that interested me the most. I remember each version of each function was described (e.g., ALOG, DLOG, CLOG), many of them handled complex numbers as arguments, and there were hyperbolic trig fuctions (sinh, cosh, tanh), a gamma function, and many more, probably erf. I believe it was an IBM facility where we learned FORTRAN that year, which would fit with the WATFOR compiler (by IBM) having an extensive library of such math functions that year, especially since those functions were not intrinsic to the Fortran IV language. Currently my best guess is that the book described was Introduction to Fortran IV Programming: Using the WATFOR / WATFIV Compilers, by John M. Blatt, 1971, Goodyear Publishing Company, shown above, though I have not obtained a copy yet to confirm this.
There was a brief lecture at the beginning of each class, using a standup chalk board, then we had time to work on our programs. I remember one of the first lectures was about the FORMAT statements that I later found to be so problematic.
We used cards, which must have been punched cards rather than penciled cards, although I don't specifically remember sitting at a key punch terminal there. (I did use key punch terminals extensively in college however, for ALGOL programs.) They must have had key punch terminals in a side room connecting the classroom. We wrote small programs of our own choosing, we submitted the cards each night before we left, and our programs would be run by the time we returned the following week. There was only one class per week. After the course was over we took our punched cards home to keep. Although I kept my cards for quite a while, they were useless without access to such computer facilities, so I eventually discarded them.
I believe we were given and used the 72-column coding forms that were common at the time for writing FORTRAN programs. These helped to keep parts of code in their proper columns. I seem to recall they were light green, that I needed only one because my program was so short, that I used the same sheet for writing another program, and that I kept that sheet for a long time. These forms were so large that they had to be folded in half to be tucked inside our book conveniently. The single word "Hollerith" brings back memories of that era to me, because Hollerith format was frequently mentioned in those times, but never in later years, and that name is not associated with anything else in computer science.
My main impression of FORTRAN then was that it was a very rigid language. Unlike BASIC, everything in FORTRAN had to be perfectly aligned in the correct columns-- comment markers, continuation markers, code, labels, everything. Also unlike BASIC was that the output syntax was very complicated-- whereas I casually used PRINT statements in BASIC, in FORTRAN every display was typically done with two separate statements, a PRINT statement and a FORMAT statement, and every single item being printed had to be carefully considered as far as data type, number of digits to be displayed (both before and after the decimal point), intervening spaces, the assigned number of the output device, and so on. For example, if the numerical output field was too small, that part of the page would be filled with asterisks instead of numbers. Two other annoyances were that FORTRAN was extremely fussy about the presence or absence of a decimal point on numbers, and all identifiers were constrained by the bizarre rule that any identifier starting with letters I through N had to be an integer, otherwise it was considered a real number. This anomaly made it more difficult to concentrate on writing the program because of the ever-present obstacle that the many natural variable names might cause compilation problems. (It was a blessing in later years when Fortran 77 allowed an "IMPLICIT NONE" statement that nullified this anomaly.)
I could tell right away that I was not going to be able to write any interesting programs at the rate of one submission per week with all the syntax and formatting issues to address, so I chose to program only a simple mathematical problem, probably the sum of an infinite series like for pi that was only of marginal interest to me. For the first few weeks, I couldn't even get a successful compilation due to mismatched format specifiers or something in the wrong column. It was more weeks before I got any kind of readable output on my returned printouts, which was very frustrating. It took the entire span of the course to even get that one simple program running, due to all the errors from using wrong format specifiers, minor syntax errors, and so on. If I recall correctly, I finally got my program running passably before the end of the course, though the output still could have been improved, and I believe I began working on a second program after the first one began to show signs of working correctly.
Along with the rigid FORTRAN syntax, the managers of the course gave the impression of being somewhat cold. It was very consistent that every time we would arrive at night for the course, the front door of the building would be locked, and we would have to knock for a long time or even throw pebbles at the second story window until somebody came down to let us in. Admittedly in any downtown area at night a business with a lot of expensive computers isn't going to want to leave their doors open for just anyone to walk in, but I had the impression they were inconsiderate when they had a class scheduled at a specific time and place but couldn't even make sure somebody was around then to hear students knocking on the downstairs door. I also didn't feel we got very good help while writing the programs, especially on the FORMAT statements.
The one thing that did impress me about FORTRAN was the terrific list of math functions and math formulas in the back of their book. I loved math--that was the whole reason I got into programming in the first place-- and I had never seen some of those infinite series before. Some functions such as "erf" may have been new to me, as well. That their computer could handle complex numbers also impressed me. In BASIC a programmer would have to always work around complex numbers to avoid runtime errors, whereas in FORTRAN complex numbers could be used without fear. Through miscommunication and delays and the right people not showing up at the right times (more evidence that the class was badly managed), it turned out that I never paid for the book they gave me, despite bringing the money, and I felt guilty about that ever since.
Typical fun high school immaturity was always present, of course. Upon leaving the building a few minutes early one night, Dan Moody and I decided to scare the other people in our car pool by making them think we left without them, so we ran around to the other side of the block, giggling like fools. Upon circling back, we rounded a corner at high speed and scared a middle-aged man walking by, who jumped and put his arms up, thinking he was going to be mugged. We laughed about that later on. Another humorous incident... One person from our high school who we didn't know very well was also in the class, and he was very interested in surveys and their statistical analysis. He had recently obtained extensive survey results from students at our high school on some topic, had coded the data onto IBM cards, and was in the process of writing a FORTRAN program to analyze that data. At one point he boasted in an imperialistic manner: "By the time we're done, we're going to know how many pinkos are in our school!" We all laughed at his maniacal declaration, even though I didn't know what a "pinko" was, back then.
That student with the survey project must have somehow been more closely associated with that company or facility than the rest of us, because he was way ahead of the rest of us and seemed to spend more time there and to know much more about the equipment. Possibly he knew somebody who worked there, or maybe was given use of their facilities as a result of the high school survey he was doing. He could have been the one who spread the word through friends at high school that there was a free FORTRAN class we could take, since the students taking that course weren't the usual ones I hung around with, and not the ones who had been in my BASIC class the previous year. There were also adults in the class we didn't know and with whom we never associated. Probably this was a free class for anybody in the San Diego community.
A few of my followup experiences with FORTRAN in later years... It wasn't until 1981 when I was back in school that I began coding in FORTRAN again--an interim of nine years. By then Fortran 77 was being used, which made programming much easier. For example, Fortran 77 allowed a single unformatted output statement "PRINT *, ..." to be used instead of having to worry about which format and which output device number to use. Also, cards were no longer used, although jobs were still submitted in batch form to a mainframe computer, and there existed an old card-sorting machine in back that the library used. In 1983 one computer science student in our math class was arrogantly critical of FORTRAN and of the math course that recommended FORTRAN, due to something he called "structured programming" that I hadn't learned about yet. But by the time I first taught FORTRAN in 1993, Fortran 90 was in use, and had overcome that shortcoming as well. Then when I taught FORTRAN again in 1999, FORTRAN was available on PCs for the first time, which absolutely astonished me, since for the past 27 years I had known it only as a language run on mainframes. This unending improvement of FORTRAN was also noticed by Tony Hoare in 1982, when he issued his famous quote: "I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran."
or maybe:
