Fortran

So before this, if you wanted to program something, you had to have this really deep understanding of the computer's architecture and memory organization. And it was really time consuming and error prone. And you really had to create base instructions just for the machine that you were using.

Peter Bauman, Georg Bak on the Analog Era: 1950s Art

In the ‘60s, artists like Manfred Mohr would have used punch cards—writing in Fortran or something similar—and feeding them into a massive mainframe computer. The computer job would take hours or even days.

Matt DesLauriers, Matt DesLauriers on a Generative World