Comment by richardantj
4 days ago
It's 30 years since I last used Fortran to pass my Civil & Structural Bachelor's and Masters. Loved the simplicity of it, modelling spring stiffness in concrete and steel piles hammers into the ground and tie rods being pulled out of their grout anchors. However, what blows my mind is that something I did on a 386/ 486 as a 3-6 month research degree is now modelled by AI and run on my desktop in minutes.
I once visited the office of a scientist at the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune, India, where they had an Unix SMP RISC (2 MIPS CPUs) computer, IIRC, supplied by the company where I worked. He said some of his programs took a week to run on that beast (i.e. beast for that period) and then spat out one or just a few numbers as the result. :) I think the programs were in Fortran or C. That fairly expensive computer was used by only him. I was a bit in awe of that. It was a central government laboratory, huge campus, only one of its kind in the country, so I guess they had a good amount of funding.
Sometimes I think I should have gone into scientific computing. It seems pretty interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Chemical_Laboratory
Well, what happened with your degree? Do you use it?