The 1950s were the golden age of computing, and almost everything since has been a variation on what was settled then. The pattern ran like this. A machine nobody could afford to leave idle, and a compiler given away to sell it. Then a user group that wrote the teaching material the vendor did not, and a standard that arrived a decade late and quietly ended the lock-in. IBM ran that sequence with FORTRAN between 1957 and 1966, and it is running it again now.
