Fortran is great. For those of you not so old, you might find this particularly difficult to believe. If so, I recommend this article, FORTRAN, by Grady Booch, written up as part of IBM’s Centennial celebrations.
The article is well worth a read, but I would like to add my two cents. Before Fortran, if you wanted to program a computer, you had to write in assembly language. For computer programmers, this may have not been a big deal, but even for them it would be time consuming. What was magic about Fortran was that an engineer, scientist or mathematician could take their formula and their data and easily code it in a language that looked similar to what they were doing with pencil and paper. It made sense.
Don’t forget, back then, much of computing was doing calculations and processing data. It wasn’t word processing or email or anything text based. It was numbers and math. Fortran made all that easier. It made computers more accessible.
Part of the great history of computing is the expansion of use. Key pieces of technology have enabled more people to climb on the bandwagon of computing and take advantage of it. Fortran is one of those key pieces of technology.
While the opinions expressed here and do not represent IBM, I think I stand with alot of IBM employees when I say that I am proud to be associated with the work of others within IBM on the Fortran language. Hat’s off to John Backus and all the people who came with him and after to develop the Fortran language!
(Image is of The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 (October 15, 1956), the first Programmer’s Reference Manual for Fortran, from the Wikipedia entry on Fortran )
Smart People I Know 
After a very long hiatus I recently started playing around with g95 and have looked at some of the more recent standards. It really is a shame that the ‘kids’ are so terribly biased against fortran is in reality, it does everything they could want and probably a bit more. Someone tell them they don’t have to start in column 7 anymore
Ha! Yes, it is not the Fortran of the 1960s, for sure. and like you said, it is a powerful language, especially on the right hardware platform. A perfect language for engineers or economists and others working with alot of formulae or complex models.