strangest systems I've sent email from

On 04/29/2016 01:51 PM, ben wrote: I evaluated UNIX FORTRAN for my research group in 1976 or so. It was not pretty. We found it took about 750 ms to format a single floating point number and print it out. This was probably before we got out 11/45, so it wasn't on a high performance PDP-11 CPU, but it was WAY worse than any other language. We also found the computed goto worked backwards. The order of the less than and greater than branches was reversed. This made it pretty clear that practically NOBODY was using it. Not a good sign. I suspect Pascal must have existed as people were doing TeX documents, but we didn't have it then. This was on Bell Systems UNIX. After discovering these issues, we went with RSX-11M, and were happy as clams. That was also a great way to develop a bunch of code before the VAX came out. Jon