Making progress

In reading a post at Dr. Dobbs CodeTalk it mentioned that FORTRAN started with a character set of only 48 Characters.  And included a link to the Programmers Reference Manual for FORTRAN on the IBM 704 machine dated October 15, 1956.  In reading through the document it becomes apparent how far we’ve come… certainly nowhere near where we need to be, but at least we don’t have functions in our modern languages to check and set the status of lights on the console and the status of switches.