In 1974, while attending High School, I wrote a Fortran program to display the Starship Enterprise on a 132-column printer. The program was executed on an IBM 1620 mainframe which was first produced in 1957. This computer only had 2K memory (less than today's hand held devices) so the program had to be split into 7 segments to run. The program was extremely tedious to write but required no advance techniques. It simply consisted of a list of Fortran FORMAT statements using the ancient Hollerith field notation.
I carried this program with me from computer to computer and operating system to operating system in case I one day wanted to update it. The opportunity arrived 27 years later in 2001 when I had the time to convert it to the Java Applet running below. This time the programming was a little more difficult since I had to parse the Hollerith fields from the original program.
-
-
-
-