FORTRAN at the Dining Room Table

When I was back home recently, my mother and I reminisced about the programming classes she took in the 1980s.

I joined her for a BASIC course at our local community college when I was very young, but she went further, learning both FORTRAN and COBOL. I remember stacks of dot-matrix paper spread across our dining room table, filled with the work of computers that still felt slightly mysterious to me.

My mother was a math major, and she remembered FORTRAN as a particularly enjoyable language to learn. Its combination of mathematics, structure, and logic made sense to her.

That conversation came back to me recently when I played FORTRAN, a vintage 1973 board game, with my work colleagues before a happy hour.

On the surface, the game looks like it should be pretty boring.

The board resembles a printed computer flowchart. Players move through lines of code, update registers, calculate values, and follow branching instructions. Nothing about the box immediately suggests that people will be leaning across the table, watching one another’s moves, and trying to determine exactly when to end the game.

The box cover, however, confidently promises: “Output: Pleasure.”

Surprisingly, I think it lands squarely on fun.

FORTRAN was designed to introduce young players to the fundamentals of computer programming. Each player acts as an instruction pointer, moving through a program and executing the command where they land.

Everyone shares three memory registers: A, B, and C. Players assign values, perform calculations, evaluate conditions, and move through branches and loops. When the program produces an output, that value is added to the player’s personal “printer,” which serves as their score.

The shared registers are what make the game strategic. You can change a value to improve your own position, only to discover that you have set up the next player for an even larger score. You have to follow the math, understand the logic, anticipate where the program may take you, and watch how every move changes the system for everyone else.

The ending adds another layer.

The game stops immediately when a player executes the final instruction. But the person who ends the program does not necessarily win. Victory goes to the player with the highest accumulated printer output.

You are not just trying to score points. You are trying to determine when the game should end.

Finish too early, and someone else may be ahead.

Wait too long, and another player may shut down the program while they are on top.

That creates a surprisingly effective mix of math, timing, risk, and strategy. It also turns a lesson about programming into a lesson about decision-making. The rules of a system matter, but so does knowing when to push toward the finish and when to keep the system running.

FORTRAN is also a reminder that modern programming languages did not appear from nowhere. Variables, loops, calculations, stored values, conditional statements, and ordered instructions remain central to software development today.

The syntax has changed. The tools are faster. The interfaces are friendlier. But the underlying logic is still there.

Those same foundations now support data science, modeling and simulation, and artificial intelligence. AI can generate code, perform calculations, and move through complex processes at speeds that would have seemed impossible when this game was published. Yet beneath that speed are still data, mathematics, instructions, conditions, and decisions.

That is what made playing FORTRAN by hand feel so refreshing.

There was no AI assistant calculating the next value. No software traced the program or warned us that we had missed a step. The players had to become the computer.

We followed the instructions, updated the memory, performed the math, tested the conditions, and watched the consequences move through the system. The process was slow enough to see and simple enough to understand, but still unpredictable once several human players began competing inside it.

In an age when technology increasingly hides the work from us, FORTRAN makes the work visible again.

My mother learned the language in a classroom, with dot-matrix printouts covering our dining room table. Decades later, I encountered the same logic around a game table with a team that now builds experiences using digital platforms, simulations, and AI.

The technology has changed dramatically. The value of understanding what happens beneath it has not.

Sometimes the best way to understand where technology is going is to slow it down, put the logic back into human hands, and play with the ideas that started it all.

Output: Pleasure, indeed. But the more lasting output may be understanding.