11 Oct
2025
11 Oct
'25
2:59 a.m.
Going through my endless piles of *stuff* I have come across some
manuals that might already be scanned, might not. So anyone know if
these are archived somewhere?
* TSX Plus: 4 RX02 floppies. Version 6.40, 6.5
o Along with release notes for 6.40 dated Jan 16, 1989
* SDC-RXV31 floppy controller manual: Sigma information systems, 1984
* DHV11 Technnical manual
* DLV11 users guide ek-dlv11J-ug-001
* RA80 disk drive service manual (booklet, tough to scan)
* RLV12 disk controller user's guide
* MSC4806 Expansion memory board User's manual (10-29-1982)
o MSC is Monilithis Systems Corporation
o I think I have some of these boards
* Computer Products: Instruction manual, Model 307 Clock Calendar
* GTSC: Instruction manual, Model 304 Serial IO board
* Fortran 11 reference manual (unsure of title)
Thanks!
Chris
12 Oct
12 Oct
6:39 p.m.
*THE* first place to check is always: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/
Lee Courtney
On Sat, Oct 11, 2025 at 10:58 PM Christopher Zach via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Going through my endless piles of *stuff* I have come
across some
manuals that might already be scanned, might not. So anyone know if
these are archived somewhere?
* TSX Plus: 4 RX02 floppies. Version 6.40, 6.5
o Along with release notes for 6.40 dated Jan 16, 1989
* SDC-RXV31 floppy controller manual: Sigma information systems, 1984
* DHV11 Technnical manual
* DLV11 users guide ek-dlv11J-ug-001
* RA80 disk drive service manual (booklet, tough to scan)
* RLV12 disk controller user's guide
* MSC4806 Expansion memory board User's manual (10-29-1982)
o MSC is Monilithis Systems Corporation
o I think I have some of these boards
* Computer Products: Instruction manual, Model 307 Clock Calendar
* GTSC: Instruction manual, Model 304 Serial IO board
* Fortran 11 reference manual (unsure of title)
Thanks!
Chris
--
Lee Courtney
+1-650-704-3934 cell
10:48 p.m.
Sure, but there may be other copies. I do need to get rid of this stuff,
so if it's not needed it can go to the mighty dustbin.
I'll hang onto the SDC, TSX, DHV, MSC, and CPI manual, as I have these
boards. The Fortran thing is like a DEC's version of introduction to
Fortran, probably F77 from what I can see.
C
On 10/12/2025 2:39 PM, Lee Courtney via cctalk wrote:
*THE* first place to check is always:
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/
Lee Courtney
On Sat, Oct 11, 2025 at 10:58 PM Christopher Zach via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Going through my endless piles of *stuff* I have
come across some
manuals that might already be scanned, might not. So anyone know if
these are archived somewhere?
* TSX Plus: 4 RX02 floppies. Version 6.40, 6.5
o Along with release notes for 6.40 dated Jan 16, 1989
* SDC-RXV31 floppy controller manual: Sigma information systems, 1984
* DHV11 Technnical manual
* DLV11 users guide ek-dlv11J-ug-001
* RA80 disk drive service manual (booklet, tough to scan)
* RLV12 disk controller user's guide
* MSC4806 Expansion memory board User's manual (10-29-1982)
o MSC is Monilithis Systems Corporation
o I think I have some of these boards
* Computer Products: Instruction manual, Model 307 Clock Calendar
* GTSC: Instruction manual, Model 304 Serial IO board
* Fortran 11 reference manual (unsure of title)
Thanks!
Chris
7:04 p.m.
New subject: "Fortran 11"? (Was: Old Dec/pdp11 manuals and software, is it archived?
On Fri, 10 Oct 2025, Christopher Zach via cctalk wrote:
* Fortran 11 reference manual (unsure of title)
"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
9 p.m.
New subject: "Fortran 11"? (Was: Old Dec/pdp11 manuals and software, is it archived?
We switched from IBM 1130 FORTRAN to WATFOR in 1975 at Portland State.
Since we had the source, we added some extensions.
Good times, Jim Davis.
On Sun, Oct 12, 2025 at 12:52 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Fri, 10 Oct 2025, Christopher Zach via cctalk
wrote:
* Fortran 11 reference manual (unsure of title)
"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
14 Oct
14 Oct
12:06 a.m.
New subject: "Fortran 11"? (Was: Old Dec/pdp11 manuals and software, is it archived?
So i have a memory of seeing Fortran-11 docs. It was the Fortran66 version
with overlay support. But I mostly remember that being Fortran IV.
On Mon, Oct 13, 2025, 3:17 PM Jim Davis via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
We switched from IBM 1130 FORTRAN to WATFOR in 1975 at
Portland State.
Since we had the source, we added some extensions.
Good times, Jim Davis.
On Sun, Oct 12, 2025 at 12:52 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Fri, 10 Oct 2025, Christopher Zach via cctalk
wrote:
Backus.
* Fortran 11 reference manual (unsure of title)
"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
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
12:55 a.m.
New subject: "Fortran 11"? (Was: Old Dec/pdp11 manuals and software, is it archived?
On Oct 12, 2025, at 5:00 PM, Jim Davis via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
We switched from IBM 1130 FORTRAN to WATFOR in 1975 at Portland State.
Since we had the source, we added some extensions.
I occasionally ran WATFIV jobs at Lawrence University (Appleton, WI). That was a bit
annoying. WATFIV was a wonderfully fast load-and-go compiler for student programs, which
would accept a tall stack of lots of programs to run all as a single OS job. But if one
hit an infinite loop I had to cancel the job and reload WATFIV with the remaining
(skipped) programs. The reason was that our 360 model 44 had "only" 128 kB of
memory, and only OS/360-PCP was small enough to fit in that small a memory. (Hah. We ran
a whole timesharing system for the college in half that much on the PDP 11/20.) PCP
didn't support timers, so while WATFIV let you specify a job time limit that
didn't do anything.
I ended up doing a small kernel hack to hook the "interrupt" button on the
console panel into the timer expiration handler, so you could watch for what seemed like a
stuck program and just hit "interrupt" to kill it. I think this worked because
that button appeared as something tied to the console printer, so I could do a control I/O
request on that device. It didn't have a name but its device control block could be
found, and that's all that the application needs to do I/O to it. :-)
Security? Not so much, not in IBM OS/360 or /370.
paul
3:11 a.m.
New subject: "Fortran 11"? (Was: Old Dec/pdp11 manuals and software, is it archived?
On Mon, Oct 13, 2025 at 9:12 PM Paul Koning via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
I occasionally ran WATFIV jobs at Lawrence University
(Appleton, WI). That was a bit annoying. WATFIV was a wonderfully fast load-and-go
compiler for student programs, which would accept a tall stack of lots of programs to run
all as a single OS job. But if one hit an infinite loop I had to cancel the job and
reload WATFIV with the remaining (skipped) programs.
I remember running simple FORTRAN jobs on the WATFIV compiler at Ohio
State in 1984, on an Amdahl of some recent vintage. The jobs had an
incredibly small CPU limit, so if you had an infinite loop, you
exhausted your CPU quota and got killed (it was under 1 sec of CPU
time IIRC - large for the length of time our simple jobs were running,
but small by outside standards). ISTR you had to do some JCL magic if
you wanted to run programs that really did take multiple CPU seconds
(and your funny-money account took a pretty big hit for it).
-ethan
12 Oct
12 Oct
10:17 p.m.
New subject: "Fortran 11"? (Was: Old Dec/pdp11 manuals and software, is it archived?
On Sun, 2025-10-12 at 12:04 -0700, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
On Fri, 10 Oct 2025, Christopher Zach via cctalk
wrote:
There was no Fortran 2011. Standards since 1990 have been 95, 2003,
2008, 2018, and 2023. The next revision is under development. I have
PDF for all standards, including 66 and 77. Ask if you want one.
Array processing was added in 1990.
Object Oriented was added in 2003.
A very simple method for SPMD parallel programming (much simpler than
PVM or MPI) called coarrays was added in 2008.
2018 and 2023 were minor revisions.
The next revision will include templates.
* Fortran 11 reference manual (unsure of title)
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?)
"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)
Univac 1108 came with FORTRAN V, with many useful extensions such as
internal procedures. Jack Perrine's competing Athena FORTRAN V included
macros.
Grumpy Ol' Fred
cisin(a)xenosoft.com
Van, US and ISO Fortran committees 1997-2020. Emeritus member now.
10:38 p.m.
New subject: "Fortran 11"? (Was: Old Dec/pdp11 manuals and software, is it archived?
> 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?)
On Sun, 12 Oct 2025, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote:
There was no Fortran 2011. Standards since 1990 have
been 95, 2003,
2008, 2018, and 2023. The next revision is under development. I have
PDF for all standards, including 66 and 77. Ask if you want one.
Thank you
Peter Coghlan pointed out to me that "Fortran 11" might well mean FORTRAN
for the PDP-11.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
13 Oct
13 Oct
1:11 p.m.
New subject: "Fortran 11"? (Was: Old Dec/pdp11 manuals and software, is it archived?
Since the original thread was about DEC things, that Fortran II manual
could well be this:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp9/DEC-9B-AFT0-D_FORTRANII.pdf
I.e., Fortran II (Roman "two") for the PDP-9.
That machine was apparently announced in 1966 and superseded by the
PDP-15 in 1970; thus, not unreasonable that it would be DEC's
adaptation of FORTRAN II (of 1958) to their hardware.
On Mon, Oct 13, 2025 at 12:47 AM Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 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?)
On Sun, 12 Oct 2025, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote:
There was no Fortran 2011. Standards since 1990
have been 95, 2003,
2008, 2018, and 2023. The next revision is under development. I have
PDF for all standards, including 66 and 77. Ask if you want one.
Thank you
Peter Coghlan pointed out to me that "Fortran 11" might well mean FORTRAN
for the PDP-11.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
14 Oct
14 Oct
3:01 a.m.
On Sun, Oct 12, 2025 at 1:58 AM Christopher Zach via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Going through my endless piles of *stuff* I have come across some
manuals that might already be scanned, might not. So anyone know if
these are archived somewhere?
* Computer Products: Instruction manual, Model 307 Clock Calendar
That could be interesting. I have been looking for Model 307 docs.
Seems the GTSC 306 is similar, though.
* GTSC: Instruction manual, Model 304 Serial IO
board
There's a Model 304 manual in here -> https://bitsavers.org/pdf/gtsc/
Cheers,
-ethan
2
days inactive
5
days old
12 comments
11 participants
participants (11)
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Christopher Zach -
cz -
Ethan Dicks -
Fred Cisin -
Jim Davis -
Lee Courtney -
Magnus Ringman -
Mark Linimon -
Paul Koning -
Van Snyder -
Warner Losh