I was preparing to make the leap and buy my first personal computer--a PDP-8/E back in the day. The attraction was not just the low price of around $5000, but the fact that there was FORTRAN available for it. DEC made a big deal of that in their promotions.
Wrote an emulator for it (in FORTRAN, of course) and still have my copy of Introduction to Programming". Never got the machine, however--other things got in the way. I still routinely deal with FORTRAN (capitalize the name for dialects earlier than F90). It's still hard to beat for a portable, fast mathematical HLL. The big competitor back in the day from Europe, Algol, appears to have disappeared from collective consciousness. --Chuck
