Fortran Turns 70: Manchester Workshop Looks Back and Forward
15 October 2026 marks 70 years since the first Fortran manual was published. The Institute of Computing for Climate Science (ICCS) will mark the anniversary with a Celebrating 70 years of Fortran event at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, United Kingdom, on 1 December 2026, according to the official fortran-lang.org announcement.
The format is a special half-day workshop. The main workshop runs from 14:30 to 18:15 in the museum conference suite, followed by an evening drinks reception in the exhibition hall. The reception includes a demonstration of the 1940s experimental computer Baby (Manchester Baby). Attendance is free. The event is mainly in person, with an option to join remotely via Zoom. Registration closes on 9 November 2026.
The programme covers past and future. Damian Rouson of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will give the keynote address on Fortran's past 70 years. The workshop will include lightning talks, which are very short presentations, poster submissions, and an open breakout discussion on the next 70 years. The announcement was authored by Joe Wallwork of the Institute of Computing for Climate Science, University of Cambridge.
FORTRAN stands for IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System. It was developed by IBM and debuted in 1957. John Backus's team built the first optimizing compiler for Fortran, software that translates readable code into efficient hardware instructions. The first Fortran compiler translated programs into numerical codes for the IBM 704. IBM published a manual titled Programmer's Primer for FORTRAN Automatic Coding System in 1957, as documented in IBM history.
ICCS describes Fortran as a programming language that has played a pivotal role in scientific software, and describes the Manchester meeting as a special half-day workshop, per its event page. Recent activity fits that picture. The Software Sustainability Institute's Collaborations Workshop 2026 attracted around a hundred researchers, research software engineers and research technical professionals to Belfast. Back to the Fortran Future 3 brought together dedicated members of the UK Fortran community ahead of that workshop. The Back to the Fortran Future workshop series started as a satellite event of RSECon 2024 in Newcastle.
Tooling shares billing with history. The Fortran Index Hackathon series aims to improve the Fortran-Lang website and make it easier to find useful Fortran packages, which are reusable collections of code. Fortitude is a linter that performs static analysis of Fortran code, checking code without running it, to help write safer, cleaner and more modern software. Fortran-Lang is collecting legacy Fortran patterns that make systems hard to understand, test, maintain or modernise, together with tested alternatives. The monthly Fortran newsletter is published at the beginning of every month and details Fortran news from the previous month. Damian Rouson delivered an IWOMP keynote titled Fortran is all you need.
The broader context here is persistence through utility. Languages that last seven decades do so because production code depends on them and because the cost of incorrect results exceeds the cost of maintaining old code. For people who maintain numerical models, libraries and coupled systems, the question is not whether Fortran remains in use. It is how to keep that code testable, portable and performant without freezing development practices around it.
In my view, the Manchester agenda is a practical answer. A keynote on the past 70 years gives continuity. Lightning talks, posters and a breakout on the next 70 years share migration paths, tooling and packaging practice. Worth flagging, the parallel threads matter: a package index to improve discovery, a linter for static analysis, and a catalogue of legacy patterns with tested alternatives. That routine work keeps a mature language productive for new contributors as well as long-term maintainers. I watched my own children adopt new platforms with little regard for what came before, then meet familiar limits around correctness, performance and long-term maintenance. Fortran users learned those lessons early. If the December discussion captures them in automation and documentation rather than oral tradition, the next 70 years become easier to staff, not just easier to picture.
