Grey Havoc
ACCESS: USAP
- Joined
- 9 October 2009
- Messages
- 24,500
- Reaction score
- 18,176
Via Slashdot:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/cruc...cle-physics-at-risk-of-obsolescence-20221201/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/cruc...cle-physics-at-risk-of-obsolescence-20221201/
FORM got its start in the mid-1980s, when the role of computers was changing rapidly. Its predecessor, a program called Schoonschip created by Martinus Veltman, was released as a specialized chip that you plugged into the side of an Atari computer. Vermaseren wanted to make a more accessible program that could be downloaded by universities around the world. He began to program it in the computer language FORTRAN, which stands for Formula Translation. The name FORM was a riff on that. (He later switched to a programming language called C.) Vermaseren released his software in 1989. By the early ’90s, over 200 institutions around the world had downloaded it, and the number kept climbing.