Meadowlark: Sheffield based computer consultancy

Software tools we use:

Fortran

FORTRAN (FORmulaTRANslator) was a programming language adopted by the scientific community for its superior (at the time) number crunching performance, its portability, and its execution speed. Originally it had some foibles that took the unwary by surprise, like fixed formating, and computed goto statements. But a vast quantity of FORTRAN code has been written.

Ultimately, despite the efforts of interested parties, FORTRAN did not keep up with modern developments in programming languages, OOPs languages for example, and its speed of execution was no longer cited as a key benefit when interpreted languages or just in time (JIT) languages could deliver satisfactory performance and a more interactive programming experience.

Meadowlark have used FORTRAN to produce computer simulations of agricultural systems, computer models for medics, and data transformation applications for microbiologists.

Advantages of FORTRAN

• FORTRAN programs are compiled, and therefore extract the maximum performance from any given processor.
• Without producing applications with many bells and whistles, FORTRAN programmers can code and execute number crunching software quickly and relatively easily.
• FORTRAN is old and therefore its foibles are well known.

What you can expect from computer hardware in the future?

Smaller faster, cheaper, lighter computers for the desktop. They will be no larger than a DVD drive. They will be silent, and run free software, and much of this will be web based. They will use solid state disks, and large quantities of cheap memory.

More powerful mobile phones will largely replace traditional PCs. The screens of mobiles will occupy as much of the phone as physicallly possible. Soft buttons will have largely replaced mechanical buttons in top of the range phones.

Sophisticated screen display technology will be available that will allow us to use bigger computer monitors in smaller less likely workplaces.

Micro-factories: places of work no bigger than a loft extension, where budding entrepreneurs labour in their free time printing products with 3D printers and selling their wares by the internet.