[cctalk] Re: "Fortran 11"? (Was: Old Dec/pdp11 manuals and software, is it archived?

On Fri, 10 Oct 2025, Christopher Zach via cctalk wrote: "Fortran 11" could be "G-Fortran 11" (G: GNU ("GNU is Not Unix")) But, If that is Roman numeral 2, then it is "FORTRAN" 2/II (1958 - 1961?) FORTRAN was annnounced in 1954, and was primarily the work of John Backus. First FORTRAN compiler seems to have been 1957. Name is short for "FORmula TRANslation". Name is All CAPS. (IBM computers of the time, and punch cards, did not have lower case) Alrhough later, sometimes, the "ORTRAN" part is typeset in small CAPS (capital/upper-case characters in lower-case size) FORTRAN 77 was the last version where the official character set was all CAPS. In 1990? the standards committee started using "Fortran", instead of "FORTRAN", for their newer versions. Many, even such as Wikipedia, try to RETROACTIVELY apply that name change to earlier material; I consider that extremely inappropriate. Or I might possibly have missed out on a revised standard in 2011, which would, indeed, be "Fortran 11" (two digit year, for early start creating Y3K?) There were other variants both of language and name, such as "PDQ FORTRAN" ("Pretty Damn Quick FORTRAN"), a variant of FORTRAN II (I used it on 1620 1967-1969 at Merritt College) (NOT to be confused with "PDQ" (Program for Diffusion and Quasi-static calculations) (a computational tool written in FORTRAN, for solving neutron diffusion equations in nuclear physics.)) "WATFOR", later "WATF-IV" (WATerloo FORTRAN IV" (NOT "FIVE")), FORTRAN variant, with fascinating extensions, from WATerloo University. (I used it a bit on 360, around 1970, at George Washington University) I first started learning FORTRAN on May 25, 1964, following my father's experience with inexcusably BUGGY programs written by IBM for the CBS "National Drivers Test". (He had to frantically manually fix serious errors in their results, for Walter Cronkite on live TV) The whole family started studying, using the books by McCracken and Decima Anderson. More Trivia: a colleague, who needed to learn Spanish, tried to do so by getting a copy of McCracken in Spanish. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com