FORTRAN to the rescue – the problems FORTRAN addressed
After the initial successes of the computer (breaking German codes and calculating logarithms), the field ran into two problems. Firstly, the machine itself was slow—or at least slower than desired—for the new problems at hand. Secondly, it took too long to write the instructions (code) that the machine would execute to solve the problem.
Making the machine itself faster was largely an engineering problem. The underlying substrate went from steam and valves to electromechanical relays to vacuum tubes to integrated circuits. Each change in the substrate improved the rate at which instructions could be executed. This form of progress, while interesting, is outside of the scope of this book.
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