Learning the ropes

I was challenged at first in the Stress office at Dowty, the analysis side of things was driven off a Cyber mainframe computer and we all had a TTY terminal.

Therefore any custom work was not done through Lotus 123 or GWbasic, the system used a derivative of Fortran IV and I had never programmed in Fortran, so I had a learning curve before getting started if I wanted to use custom Roark or Bruhn formulae.

However, Dowty already had a suite of programs and a solid pair of instruction manuals, S-1200 and S-1201, they paired theory and input format which was refreshing for a new starter as once you had mastered the TTY terminal you had access to a broad range of pre-compiled programs.

And I still used my PB-700 for a lot of those simple calculations.

The essence of mastering Fortran was to establish methods to input a file and output the result, once that was done, the "twiddly" bit in the middle where the formulae would go was just a case of syntax. The thing about Fortran which was initially difficult to grasp was the way that subroutines were handled, especially with common variables, and the endless formatting of input and output with the added confusion of tape definition.

I know this is all sounding geeky, and it was to a great extent, plenty of reasons to install a pocket protector on this subject, suffice to say, I found the need to learn Fortran quickly and that presented me with a great side project in the first six months of learning the ropes at Dowty.