Fortran celebrates 70th anniversary
The gist
Fortran's first manual was published on October 15, 1956, marking the language's official birth.
Seventy years on, it still underpins weather, climate and nuclear engineering code.
How it unfolded
- Oct 15, 1956The FORTRAN Programmer's Reference Manual is published, marking the official birth of the language.
- Sep 15, 2026Joe Wallwork of the Institute of Computing for Climate Science, University of Cambridge, publishes the blog post 'Celebrating 70 years of Fortran' on fortran-lang.org.
- Oct 15, 2026Date marking seventy years since the first Fortran manual was published.