Winston Smith wrote in a message to Roger Scudder:

 WS>   Re: Windows XP home Edition
 WS>   By: Roger Scudder to Bill Birrell on Tue Oct 14 2003 05:20 pm 

 > 
 > On: 14 Oct 03  00:32:00 Bill Birrell wrote to Vince Coen:
 > 
 >  > Fortransoft, and I still use their Fortran 77. It still works perfectly
 > satisfactorily.
 > 
 >  I have no exposure to Fortran.  The only thing I know about it is
 > that it is an old engineering language.  What sort of programs to 
 > you write in Fortran?
 

 WS> ForTran is the high level language version of the IBM 360 Assembly
 WS> language (BAL for Basic Assembly Language? 

No way.  The 360 series of machines weren't out until the 1960s,  FORTRAN
was out in the 1950s.  The name stands for FORmula TRANslator.

 WS> I forget what the Assembler is called).  It copied all of the IBM 
 WS> data structures right down to the Hollerith declarations for 
 WS> declaring string constants that conform to the Hollerith 
 WS> tabulation machine census data.  ForTran is to IBM Assembler what 
 WS> C is to DEC Assembler Macro-11. 

FORTRAN is not free-form because input when it was designed was by way of
punched cards,  rather than from a terminal,  for the most part.

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