In April 2020, we blogged about how to get COBOL running on Cloudflare Workers by compiling to WebAssembly. The ecosystem around WebAssembly has grown significantly since then, and it has become a solid foundation for all types of projects, be they client-side or server-side.
As WebAssembly support has grown, more and more languages are able to compile to WebAssembly for execution on servers and in browsers. As Cloudflare Workers uses the V8 engine and supports WebAssembly natively, we’re able to support languages that compile to WebAssembly on the platform.
Recently, work on LLVM has enabled Fortran to compile to WebAssembly. So, today, we’re writing about running Fortran code on Cloudflare Workers.
Before we dive into how to do this, here’s a little demonstration of number recognition in Fortran. Draw a number from 0 to 9 and Fortran code running somewhere on Cloudflare’s network will predict the number you drew.
This is taken from the wonderful Fortran on WebAssembly post but instead of running client-side, the Fortran code is running on Cloudflare Workers. Read on to find out how you can use Fortran on Cloudflare Workers and how that demonstration works.
Wait, Fortran? No one uses that!
Not so fast! Or rather, actually pretty darn fast if you’re doing a lot of numerical programming or have scientific data to work with. Fortran (originally FORmula TRANslator) is very well suited for scientific workloads because of its native functionality for things like arithmetic and handling large arrays and matrices.
If you look at the ranking of the fastest supercomputers in the world you’ll discover that the measurement of “fast” is based on these supercomputers running a piece of software called LINPACK that was originally written in Fortran. LINPACK is designed to help with problems solvable using linear algebra.
The LINPACK benchmarks use LINPACK to solve an n x n system of linear equations using matrix operations and, in doing so, determine how fast supercomputers are. The code is available in Fortran, C and Java.
A related Fortran package, BLAS, also does linear algebra and forms the basis of the number identifying code above. But other Fortran packages are still relevant. Back in 2017, NASA ran a competition to make FUN3D (used to perform calculations of airflow over simulated aircraft). FUN3D is written in Fortran.
So, although Fortran (or at the time FORTRAN) first came to life in 1957, it’s alive and well and being used widely for scientific applications (there’s even Fortran for CUDA). One particular application left Earth 20 years after Fortran was born: Voyager. The Voyager probes use a combination of assembly language and Fortran to keep chugging along.
But back in our solar system, and back on Region: Earth, you can now use Fortran on Cloudflare Workers. Here’s how.
How to get your Fortran code running on Cloudflare Workers
To make it easy to run your Fortran code on Cloudflare Workers, we created a tool called Fortiche (translates to smart in French). It uses Flang and Emscripten under the hood.
Flang is a frontend in LLVM and, if you read the Fortran on WebAssembly blog post, we currently have to patch LLVM to work around a few issues.
Emscripten is used to compile LLVM output and produce code that is compatible with Cloudflare Workers.
This is all packaged in the Fortiche Docker image. Let’s see a simple example.
add.f90:
SUBROUTINE add(a, b, res)
INTEGER, INTENT(IN) :: a, b
INTEGER, INTENT(OUT) :: res
res = a + b
END
Here we defined a subroutine called add that takes a and b, sums them together and places the result in res.
docker run -v $PWD:/input -v $PWD/output:/output xtuc/fortiche --export-func=add add.f90
Passing --export-func=add to Fortiche makes the Fortran add subroutine available to JavaScript.
The output folder contains the compiled WebAssembly module and JavaScript from Emscripten, and a JavaScript endpoint generated by Fortiche:
$ ls -lh ./output
total 84K
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 392 avril 22 12:00 index.mjs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 27K avril 22 12:00 out.mjs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 49K avril 22 12:00 out.wasm
And finally the Cloudflare Worker:
// Import what Fortiche generated
import {load} from "../output/index.mjs"
export default {
async fetch(request: Request): Promise<Response> {
// Load the Fortran program
const program = await load();
// Allocate space in memory for the arguments and result
const aPtr = program.malloc(4);
const bPtr = program.malloc(4);
const outPtr = program.malloc(4);
// Set argument values
program.HEAP32[aPtr / 4] = 123;
program.HEAP32[bPtr / 4] = 321;
// Run the Fortran add subroutine
program.add(aPtr, bPtr, outPtr);
// Read the result
const res = program.HEAP32[outPtr / 4];
// Free everything
program.free(aPtr);
program.free(bPtr);
program.free(outPtr);
return Response.json({ res });
},
};
Interestingly, the values we pass to Fortran are all pointers, therefore we have to allocate space for each argument and result (the Fortran integer type is four bytes wide), and pass the pointers to the `add` subroutine.
In 2023, we prevented 2.28 million policy-violating apps from
being published on Google Play in part thanks to our investment in
new and improved security features, policy updates, and advanced
machine learning and app review processes. We have also
strengthened our developer onboarding and review processes,
requiring more identity information when developers first
establish their Play accounts. Together with investments in our
review tooling and processes, we identified bad actors and fraud
rings more effectively and banned 333K bad accounts from Play for
violations like confirmed malware and repeated severe policy
violations.
Additionally, almost 200K app submissions were rejected or
remediated to ensure proper use of sensitive permissions such as
background location or SMS access.
App stores are just greedy monopolies, am I right?
When Marianne Smith was teaching computer science in 2016 at Flathead Valley Community College, in Kalispell, Mont., the adjunct professor noticed the female students in her class were severely outnumbered, she says.
Smith says she believed the disparity was because girls were not being introduced to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in elementary and middle school.
Code Girls United
Founded
2018
Headquarters
Kalispell, Mont.
Employees
10
In 2017 she decided to do something to close the gap. The IEEE member started an after-school program to teach coding and computer science.
What began as a class of 28 students held in a local restaurant is now a statewide program run by Code Girls United, a nonprofit Smith founded in 2018. The organization has taught more than 1,000 elementary, middle, and high school students across 38 cities in Montana and three of the state’s Native American reservations. Smith has plans to expand the nonprofit to South Dakota, Wisconsin, and other states, as well as other reservations.
“Computer science is not a K–12 requirement in Montana,” Smith says. “Our program creates this rare hands-on experience that provides students with an experience that’s very empowering for girls in our community.”
The nonprofit was one of seven winners last year of MIT Solve’s Gender Equity in STEM Challenge. The initiative supports organizations that work to address gender barriers. Code Girls United received US $100,000 to use toward its program.
“The MIT Solve Gender Equity in STEM Challenge thoroughly vets all applicants—their theories, practices, organizational health, and impact,” Smith says. “For Code Girls United to be chosen as a winner of the contest is a validating honor.”
From a restaurant basement to statewide programs
When Smith had taught her sons how to program robots, she found that programming introduced a set of logic and communication skills similar to learning a new language, she says.
Those skills were what many girls were missing, she reasoned.
“It’s critical that girls be given the opportunity to speak and write in this coding language,” she says, “so they could also have the chance to communicate their ideas.”
An app to track police vehicles
Last year Code Girls United’s advanced class held in Kalispell received a special request from Jordan Venezio, the city’s police chief. He asked the class to create an app to help the Police Department manage its vehicle fleet.
The department was tracking the location of its police cars on paper, a process that made it challenging to get up-to-date information about which cars were on patrol, available for use, or being repaired, Venezio told the Flathead Beacon.
The objective was to streamline day-to-day vehicle operations. To learn how the department operates and see firsthand the difficulties administrators faced when managing the vehicles, two students shadowed officers for 10 weeks.
The department’s administrators now more easily can see each vehicle’s availability, whether it’s at the repair shop, or if it has been retired from duty.
“It’s a great privilege for the girls to be able to apply the skills they’ve learned in the Code Girls United program to do something like this for the community,” Smith says. “It really brings our vision full circle.”
At first she wasn’t sure what subjects to teach, she says, reasoning that Java and other programming languages were too advanced for elementary school students.
She came across MIT App Inventor, a block-based visual programming language for creating mobile apps for Android and iOS devices. Instead of learning a coding language by typing it, students drag and drop jigsaw puzzle–like pieces that contain code to issue instructions. She incorporated building an app with general computer science concepts such as conditionals, logic flow, and variables. With each concept learned, the students built a more difficult app.
“It was perfect,” she says, “because the girls could make an app and test it the same day. It’s also very visual.”
Once she had a curriculum, she wanted to find willing students, so she placed an advertisement in the local newspaper. Twenty-eight girls signed up for the weekly classes, which were held in a diner. Assisting Smith were Beth Schecher, a retired technical professional; and Liz Bernau, a newly graduated elementary school teacher who taught technology classes. Students had to supply their own laptop.
At the end of the first 18 weeks, the class was tasked with creating apps to enter in the annual Technovation Girls competition. The contest seeks out apps that address issues including animal abandonment, safely reporting domestic violence, and access to mental health services.
The first group of students created several apps to enter in the competition, including ones that connected users to water-filling stations, provided people with information about food banks, and allowed users to report potholes. The group made it to the competition’s semifinals.
The coding program soon outgrew the diner and moved to a computer lab in a nearby elementary school. From there classes were held at Flathead Valley Community College. The program continued to grow and soon expanded to schools in other Montana towns including Belgrade, Havre, Joliet, and Polson.
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted the program to become virtual—which was “oddly fortuitous,” Smith says. After she made the curriculum available for anyone to use via Google Classroom, it increased in popularity.
That’s when she decided to launch her nonprofit. With that came a new curriculum.
What began as a class of 28 students held in a restaurant in Kalispell, Mont., has grown into a statewide program run by Code Girls United. The nonprofit has taught coding and computer science to more than 1,000 elementary, middle, and high school students. Code Girls United
Program expands across the state
Beginner, intermediate, and advanced classes were introduced. Instructors of the weekly after-school program are volunteers and teachers trained by Smith or one of the organization’s 10 employees. The teachers are paid a stipend.
For the first half of the school year, students in the beginner class learn computer science while creating apps.
“By having them design and build a mobile app,” Smith says, “I and the other teachers teach them computer science concepts in a fun and interactive way.”
Once students master the course, they move on to the intermediate and advanced levels, where they are taught lessons in computer science and learn more complicated programming concepts such as Java and Python.
“It’s important to give girls who live on the reservations educational opportunities to close the gap. It’s the right thing to do for the next generation.”
During the second half of the year, the intermediate and advanced classes participate in Code Girls United’s App Challenge. The girls form teams and choose a problem in their community to tackle. Next they write a business plan that includes devising a marketing strategy, designing a logo, and preparing a presentation. A panel of volunteer judges evaluates their work, and the top six teams receive a scholarship of up to $5,000, which is split among the members.
The organization has given out more than 55 scholarships, Smith says.
“Some of the girls who participated in our first education program are now going to college,” she says. “Seventy-two percent of participants are pursuing a degree in a STEM field, and quite a few are pursuing computer science.”
Introducing coding to Native Americans
The program is taught to high school girls on Montana’s Native American reservations through workshops.
Many reservations lack access to technology resources, Smith says, so presenting the program there has been challenging. But the organization has had some success and is working with the Blackfeet reservation, the Salish and Kootenai tribes on the Flathead reservation, and the Nakota and Gros Ventre tribes at Fort Belknap.
The workshops tailor technology for Native American culture. In the newest course, students program a string of LEDs to respond to the drumbeat of tribal songs using the BBC’s Micro:bit programmable controller. The lights are attached to the bottom of a ribbon skirt, a traditional garment worn by young women. Colorful ribbons are sewn horizontally across the bottom, with each hue having a meaning.
The new course was introduced to students on the Flathead reservation this month.
“Montana’s reservations are some of the most remote and resource-limited communities,” Smith says, “especially in regards to technology and educational opportunities.
“It’s important to give girls who live on the reservations educational opportunities to close the gap. It’s the right thing to do for the next generation.”
At some point, our phone habits changed. It used to be that if the phone rang, you answered it. With the advent of caller ID, you’d only pick up if it was someone you recognized. And now, with spoofing and robocalls, it can seem like a gamble to pick up the phone, period. In 2023, robocall blocking service Youmail estimates there were more than 55 billion robocalls in the United States. How did robocalls proliferate so much that now they seem to be dominating phone networks? And can any of this be undone? IEEE Spectrum spoke with David Frankel of ZipDX, who’s been fighting robocalls for over a decade, to find out.
David Frankel isthe founder of ZipDX, a company that provides audioconferencing solutions. He also created the Rraptor automated robocall surveillance system.
How did you get involved in trying to stop robocalls?
David Frankel: Twelve years ago, I was working in telecommunications and a friend of mine called me about a contest that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was starting. They were seeking the public’s help to find solutions to the robocall problem. I spent time and energy putting together a contest entry. I didn’t win, but I became so engrossed in the problem, and like a dog with a bone, I just haven’t let go of it.
How can we successfully combat robocalls?
Frankel: Well, I don’t know the answer, because I don’t feel like we’ve succeeded yet. I’ve been very involved in something calledtraceback—in fact, it was my FTC contest entry. It’s a semiautomated process where, in fact, with the cooperation of individual phone companies, you go from telco A to B to C to D, until you ultimately get somebody that sent that call. And then you can find the customer who paid them to put this call on the network.
I’ve got a second tool—a robocall surveillance network. We’ve got tens of thousands of telephone numbers that just wait for robocalls. We can correlate that with other data and reveal where these calls are coming from. Ideally, we stop them at the source. It’s a sort of sewage that’s being pumped into the telephone network. We want to go upstream to find the source of the sewage and deal with it there.
Frankel: Well, regulations are really, really tough for a couple of reasons. One is, it’s a bureaucratic, slow-moving process. It’s also a cat-and-mouse game, because, as quick as you start talking about new regulations, people start talking about how to circumvent them.
There’s also this notion of regulatory capture. At the Federal Communications Committee, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other interests.
Is the robocall situation getting better or worse?
Frankel: It’s been fairly steady state. I’m just disappointed that it’s not substantially reduced from where it’s been. We made progress on explicit fraud calls, but we still have too many of these lead-generation calls. We need to get this whacked down by 80 percent. I always think that we’re on the cusp of doing that, that this year is going to be the year. There are people attacking this from a number of different angles. Everybody says there’s no silver bullet, and I believe that, but I hope that we’re about to crest the hill.
Is this a fight that’s ultimately winnable?
Frankel: I think we’ll be able to take back our phone network. I’d love to retire, having something to show for our efforts. I don’t think we’ll get it to zero. But I think that we’ll be able to push the genie a long way back into the bottle. The measure of success is that we all won’t be scared to answer our phone. It’ll be a surprise that it’s a robocall—instead of the expectation that it’s a robocall.
This article appears in the May 2024 issue as “5 Questions for David Frankel.”
A version of this post originally appeared onTedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail.
If you ask the average person what the company 3M does, odds are if they have a few gray hairs hanging out on their scalp, they might say that the company makes floppy disks. Now, this was once true, but
if you look on 3M’s own website, you will see no mention of this legacy—it’s a firm that sells abrasive materials, adhesive tapes, filters, films, personal protective equipment, and medical equipment. (Younger people, if they recognize 3M, it’s probably because of Post-it notes, or more recently its N95 masks.)
Floppies have had a surprisingly long life—in January 2024,
Japan announced it will no longer require floppy-disk copies of government submissions. But 3M got out of the data-storage business about 28 years ago, when it transferred its floppy disk manufacturing to a spin-off called Imation. Imation is still around, under the name Glassbridge Enterprises, but with a much smaller profile.
3M’s spin-off, Imation, continued producing floppy disks after 3M itself left the business. IEEE Spectrum
Even with that said, those gray-hairs will frequently claim that of the many makers of floppies out there, 3M made the best ones. Given that, I was curious to figure out exactly why 3M became the most memorable brand in data storage during the formative days of computing, and why it abandoned the product.
How 3M Became a Key Innovator in the Production of Magnetic Data Storage
Now, to be clear, 3M did not invent magnetic storage—that was done by Austro-German engineer
Fritz Pfleumer, in 1928. He created audio tape, a recording medium that started as broad strips of paper coated with iron-powder granules, and eventually moved to less-fragile cellulose acetate with help from what would become another big name in floppy disks, BASF. At first, the innovation didn’t spread outside of Germany because of World War II.
Nor was 3M the first company to popularize magnetic media—
that was Ampex, which commercialized the tape recorder in the late 1940s. That was the point when magnetic tape turned into a major innovation in the world of music—one that, famously, Bing Crosby got to first because he gave financial support to Ampex. Incidentally, Ampex’s later spinoff, Memorex, represented Silicon Valley’s first true startup.
“Of all the businesses 3M has shed over its 100 years, the two seminal decisions that people point to as most significant involved the sale of 3M’s Duplicating Products business to Harris Corporation in Atlanta, Georgia, and the spin-off of 3M’s data-storage and imaging-systems businesses in 1996 creating a new company called Imation in Oakdale, Minnesota...”
Before World War II, one company did attempt to manufacture a tape recorder in the U.S. based on Pfluemer’s magnetic-tape invention. That firm, the Brush Development Co.,
had developed a device called the Soundmirror, produced by a Hungarian inventor named Semi J. Begun, who was likely something of a competitor to Pfleumer: Also a German, he had moved to the United States and developed a steel-based magnetic tape. The invention was used by the U.S. military during the war, and the company revisited the idea immediately after. But, it needed someone to manufacture magnetic tape for it to use.
As author David Morton noted in his 2006 book
Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology, 3M was one of the best-suited companies on the market to help Brush out. That’s because the groundbreaking work that the company had done to develop pressure-sensitive adhesive tape was an essential element of making magnetic tape effective.
3M’s adhesive-tape technology transferred readily to magnetic tape. 3M
Strangely enough, Richard Gurley Drew, the inventor of much of 3M’s tape technology, was a musician—he played banjo in a local orchestra—when he took a job with the company. He probably didn’t realize he was inventing a key element of 20th-century recording technology when he observed that auto body shops needed a way to “mask off” areas of vehicles that were being whittled down with sandpaper, but his observation would prove useful to the invention of masking tape.
As Smithsonian Magazine notes, the formulation he developed, combining cabinetmaker’s glue with glycerin, proved to be just the right level of easy-to-remove adhesive that it became an out-and-out phenomenon. You might know his invention, developed in 1925, as Scotch Tape.
In 1930, he followed it up with another invention that was even more amazing—tape made from cellophane, which by its nature was totally transparent. Another 3M employee developed the tape dispenser, and the two inventions reshaped offices the world over.
So, when Brush looked to others to produce its recording medium, 3M was well positioned to help out due to magnetic tape’s similarity with its Scotch Tape. Brush eventually moved to other manufacturers, like Dupont. But the experience led 3M to continue developing metal-oxide tape technology, leading to the creation of the Scotch 111 reel-to-reel tape, which was one of the most popular types used in recording studios throughout the 1950s, according to the
Museum of Magnetic Sound Recording.
I admittedly have long had a fascination with these reel-to-reel tapes. A number of years ago, back when I lived in Milwaukee, I found a couple of blank reel-to-reel tapes created by 3M using the Scotch name. I bought them from a junk store, and maybe paid $2 for them. They managed to follow me through three states and five cities, and now sit on
my intentionally organized pile of junk. Based on my analysis of the container and the logotype it uses, they date to the mid-1960s or earlier. (No, I have not tried to record on them.)
I’ve owned this blank Scotch 150 reel-to-reel tape for nearly 20 years. It is 50 to 60 years old. Ernie Smith
For years, 3M’s reel-to-reels had one of the strongest reputations in the music industry; they were built to be of superhigh quality. But you might be wondering, how did 3M make the leap from reel-to-reel tape to floppies? It feels like just as strange a leap as a masking tape company developing reel-to-reel audio tape.
3M manufactured a signature 5.25-inch floppy disk. IEEE Spectrum
But 3M, much as with mechanical tape, was well positioned to improve on it, leveraging its skills with mechanical media in the budding computing industry. In a way, 3M came to media manufacturing from the opposite direction than its disk-selling competitor Memorex did. Memorex started with computers and gradually came to develop and improve tape-based technology, which eventually evolved into floppy disks. On the other hand, 3M started with the raw materials and the manufacturing processes, and combined those into computing’s greatest commodity item, the floppy disk.
3M got into the floppy disk market around the
fall of 1973. It was not the only manufacturer of disks out there—some names from this era include Verbatim, Control Data, Dysan, and BASF. Most of these companies started with computing technology—for example, Dysan worked closely with Shugart Associates on the 5.25-inch floppy. But 3M wasn’t alone in starting with the raw materials. BASF, a German chemical manufacturer, has a somewhat similar corporate history and logo design to fellow thick-Helvetica enthusiast 3M. (Though 3M obviously never associated with the Nazis during World War II, so there’s that.)
3M branched out beyond standard floppy disks with a variety of magnetic-tape storage media.ComputerWorld/Google Books/3M
3M didn’t rest on its laurels with the floppy disk either, and tried to push the technology further, most notably with
Floptical disk technology, which Jim Adkisson, who helped create the 5.25-inch floppy at Shugart Associates, developed in the 1980s. A partnership of 3M, Maxell, and Iomega created the Floptical disk, which could hold 20 megabytes of data on something that looked a lot like a 3.5-inch floppy. Unfortunately the floptical disk flopped, losing out to products like Iomega’s iconic Zip drives.
3M also worked in more specialized media, developing high-capacity optical disks that fit into standard floppy and optical disk mechanisms, as well as high-end tape drives intended for the server room rather than your cassette player.
In many ways, 3M was out front on one of the most important elements of computing and was making huge profits from it. But by the end of 1995, those days were done. What changed?
3M advertised its floppy disk as more reliable than the competition in no uncertain terms.
What Led 3M to Kick a Multibillion-Dollar Business to the Curb
By 1995, 3M’s magnetic-media arm had evolved into a US $2.3 billion business, according to
Time, which made it a significant chunk of 3M’s overall offering.
But at that time, high technology—
especially consumer technology—was starting to look like a bad bet for legacy companies. This was around the same period that AT&T, still smarting from misadventures like the EO Personal Communicator, spun off Bell Labs as Lucent Technologies.
3M’s story, in its own words, suggests a similar crisis of culture. In
A Century of Innovation, a book published by the company in 2002, around the time of its 100-year anniversary, the company compared the creation of the spin-off, which it called “the most wrenching decision in its history,” to that of its determination eight years earlier to sell its Duplicating Products Division, which sold copying machines:
Of all the businesses 3M has shed over its 100 years, the two seminal decisions that people point to as most significant involved the sale of 3M’s Duplicating Products business to Harris Corporation in Atlanta, Georgia, and the spin-off of 3M’s data-storage and imaging-systems businesses in 1996 creating a new company called Imation in Oakdale, Minnesota, near 3M headquarters. The two decisions have several elements in common—both involved businesses that 3M created and, in fact, ranked number one in the marketplace for decades. They were “homegrown” businesses—largely created within 3M and commercialized and built with the energy of many internal sponsors and champions. The businesses were risky because the products were based on pioneering technologies. They not only changed the basis of competition; they also created all new, global industries. The businesses were highly profitable for decades, and they represented a significant share of the company’s total annual revenues. They also produced many of 3M’s next generation of leaders.
So what happened? Essentially, despite the company’s success working in industrial and professional settings, doing things for consumers like producing videotapes, floppy disks, and cassettes meant moving out of its comfort zone. These products, initially developed for businesses, grew so popular that they suddenly needed to be available at every big-box store and drugstore alike, and, Post-its aside, retail was not a fit for the kind of company 3M was.
But more significantly, other companies were simply better at undercutting, and per the corporate biography, that required some tough decisions to be made:
While it sold its products for little or no profit, its competition sold their products for even less. Even though the consumer business had huge growth potential, 3M had little experience with a low-cost, low-profit-margin model.
The markings were clear—exit this business, even though 3M invented it. To stay in the “dog fight” meant 3M had to invest enormous amounts of money in order to remain the low-cost producer, with no assurance that profit margins ever would improve. “Exiting it was the right decision,” [former senior vice president Al] Huber said.
Seeing what came after, it’s hard to disagree. While floppies were still a significant medium in the mid-1990s, it was obvious that they would not be enough capacity for the next generation of data hoarders. It would only be a couple of years before Apple would put the first dagger in the heart of the floppy disk with
the iMac, breaking with tradition by releasing a personal computer in 1998 with no built-in floppy disk drive.
Imation carried on a floppy-disk ad campaign through the late 1990s.
That was a harbinger of what was to come. Within a decade of the decision, floppy drives, compact cassettes, and videotapes—the three key elements of 3M’s move into consumer-driven magnetic media—had fallen by the wayside. Imation, still active today, is owned by O-Jin Corp., a Korean technology company
that basically bought it for its trademarked name.
Five Unusual Types of Products 3M Developed Over the Years
Bondo: While not developed under 3M’s roof, the Bondo brand of automotive body filler, essentially a putty designed to fill in holes and cover visual imperfections, has been owned by 3M since at least 2007. Much like Post-its and Scotch Tape, it has become a generic term for the product line it serves.
Petrifilm: You know petri dishes, the containers used to allow bacteria to grow in a lab? Yep, 3M came up with a better version of them, in the form of Petrifilm, an easy-to-deploy platelike product developed by the company’s food-safety department in 1984. The technology has become hugely important in testing for potential food-safety concerns.
Tartan track: You know how Astroturf is commonly used in sports stadiums as a replacement for grass? Tartan track is sort of the track-and-field version of Astroturf , originally designed for horse tracks. One strange element of the Tartan track story is the fact that the original formulation used mercury, making it much more dangerous than it needed to be. (This kind of problem would later be a theme for 3M, a major chemical manufacturer.)
The typodont: This weirdly named device, associated with dentistry, is essentially a plastic model of the mouth and teeth, intended to make it easier to explain what is happening in a person’s mouth. While 3M didn’t invent the typodont, which has existed since the late 19th century, it is one of the 60,000 products the company makes.
Wind-vortex generators: In 2016, 3M developed a technology to help wind turbines generate airflow more optimally to ensure they work better, in partnership with Smartblade. It’s essentially a piece of carefully placed, high-quality plastic that, when placed correctly, increases energy production on turbines by 2 to 3 percent—a boost that adds up.
Much like its one-time competitor Memorex, Imation is a technology ghost kitchen. Its former corporate parent 3M, meanwhile, has a market cap of $51.33 billion at the time of this writing.
3M’s Magnetic Legacy
In a lot of ways, I think 3M’s persisting deep association with computing, despite the fact that the company left the field decades ago, comes down to the fact that it had a very recognizable logo design during its computer heyday.
My first experience with 3M was seeing its bright red logo on floppy disks used in classrooms with Apple IIe computers in the late 1980s and early ’90s. 3M was instantly recognizable among those responsible for creating the disks we needed to load up Number Munchers and Commander Keen, and as a result, its name is forever imprinted into the brains of retro-tech nerds the world over. It is a memory that gives me warm feelings.
But 3M, for a number of reasons, is not a company that carries a lot of goodwill with younger generations. For example, the company is closely associated with the manufacturing of a variety of chemicals, including PFOS (Perfluorooctane sulfonate), a key ingredient in Scotchguard and other water-resistant materials. It’s one of many PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl) substances that are believed to be harmful to humans.
The floppy disks that I and other elder millennials associate with a company that was essential to our youthful computing experience are long gone, shuttled away as a non-core business for a giant corporation that is best described as an amalgamation of non-core businesses loosely held together by a logo and backing in chemistry and raw materials.
Even if you are, for the most part, on the same page with someone, you’re bound to disagree with them about something sooner or later. If this doesn’t happen often—or you’re navigating the situation for the first time—it can be stressful: After all, no one wants to jeopardize a functional relationship.
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What began as a class of 28 students held in a restaurant in Kalispell, Mont., has grown into a statewide program run by Code Girls United. The nonprofit has taught coding and computer science to more than 1,000 elementary, middle, and high school students. Code Girls United
3M’s spin-off, Imation, continued producing floppy disks after 3M itself left the business. IEEE Spectrum
3M’s adhesive-tape technology transferred readily to magnetic tape. 3M
In the mid-1950s, 3M advertised its Scotch audio reel-to-reel tape.
I’ve owned this blank Scotch 150 reel-to-reel tape for nearly 20 years. It is 50 to 60 years old. Ernie Smith
3M manufactured a signature 5.25-inch floppy disk. IEEE Spectrum
3M branched out beyond standard floppy disks with a variety of magnetic-tape storage media.
