IUBio

Time Magazine: Man of the Millennium

H.W. Stockman hwstock at wizard.com
Sat Sep 26 16:16:39 EST 1998


Paul Hsieh wrote:
> 
> juola at mathcs.duq.edu says...
> > Peter da Silva <peter at baileynm.com> wrote:
> > >Where's Marie Curie? I mean, really...
> >
> > Nowhere in the running.  All she did was fill in a couple of
> > holes in the periodic table.
> 
> Excuse me??  She happened to have discovered radiation you know.  Your
> microwave oven, our nuclear power plants, and the atomic age would have
> been absent without her discovery!  I'd put her in the top 50, easily.

I would vote for Joe Fortrani, the inventor of the FORTRAN 
programming language.  From humble beginnings as a janitor in 
Grace Hopper's lab, he is credited with discovering the first 
"bug", a small listening device (attached to a Luna moth) 
that had accidentally fallen into a relay in Hopper's 
computer. 

After the discovery of Joe's programming talents, Grace (or 
possibly Dennis) Hopper joined him on a cross-country tour, 
riding on the back of his Harley-Davidson "Turing Machine". 
This epic travel was the inspiration for the movies "Easy 
Rider" and "I am Joe's Bladder." 

Despite the huge commercial success of FORTRAN, Joe's real 
passion was the gamma programming language (the name was 
incorrectly translated to "C" in later years).  The Java 
language is also named after Mr. Fortrani, as "cup of Java" 
and "cup of Joe" were interchangeable phrases for "coffee" in 
the early, raw days of computer programming. 

Sadly, Joe was taken from us by an auto accident several 
years ago.  Always passionate about exotic cars, Joe was 
descending from the highest point in Delaware in his Citroen 
Deux CV, when he was sideswiped by a drunken Visual Basic 
programmer.  He survived the accident, but was so badly 
shaken that he went home and drank an entire bottle of Pepto-
Bismol, and suffered an acute Bismuth allergy attack.  
Whatever else you may learn from this tragic tale, always 
remember: VBX and Bismuth don't mix.



More information about the Neur-sci mailing list

Send comments to us at biosci-help [At] net.bio.net