It's rained nearly every day since the start of 2026 in Devon. On January 27th the River Otter reached it's highest recorded level. The picture below was taken from the footbridge in Ottery St Mary that afternoon. The river was around a metre off its peak at this point, but…
This year's Advent of Code was reduced to 12 days of puzzles. Thankfully, as I managed to complete the last puzzle I had outstanding (Day 10, part 2) a couple of days ago. In previous years I've skipped puzzles that took me a lot of effort, thinking that I'd have…
I was recently sent a copy of Knight's WEE FORTRAN by Sharpworks who had rescued it from a tape belonging to HereBeDragons. There are a couple of references to it in issues 3 and 4 of the Knight's International Sharp User Group newsletters. In 1981 it retailed for £30+VAT and…
Happy new year! This year's resolution is to blog a little more frequently, so I thought I'd start with a retrospective of last December's Advent of Code. I chose Fortran as my language (mostly 77, with a couple of forrays into 90 when I needed recursion). During Advent I managed…
Sometime in the mid-1970s, my grandmother gave me a book of Arthur C. Clarke's short stories. The first story in the book, The Nine Billion Names of God, was written in 1953. It's about a computer manufacturer who is commissioned by Tibetan monks to run a program to produce all…
Yes, really! The sharpmz.net site has a number of programs preserved for download. One of them is the BBG RealFortran compiler, v1, written by Bialke, Berendsen and Gliszczynski. I converted the .mzf file to a .wav, recorded it to a cassette tape and loaded it onto my machine. However as…