The talk will give a brief overview of the history of Fortran, Fortran standards and the Fortran Specialist Group and then concentrate on the changes to the Fortran language in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It will finish with an outline of some of the current applications of Fortran and the freely available resources for anyone who wants to try out modern Fortran.

There will also be two short films on DVD, one which was made in 1982 for the 25th anniversary of the release of the first Fortran compiler and consists of interviews with John Backus and his team describing the development of the first Fortran compiler. The second was made in 1958 by IBM's Education Department showing how an interest calculation problem could be coded in Fortran.