strange things to do with your IBM System/3x (was Re: ibm sys/36 5360 basic needed)

When I was in junior high school, my friend Doug got a job working on RPG code on a System/34. In his spare time, he translated ADVENT [*] from PDP-10 Fortran to RPG II [**] to run on the System/34. I don't know if there existed a Fortran compiler for the System/34, but if there was, his employer apparently didn't have it. COBOL would actually be a more reasonable language [***] into which to translate ADVENT, and there was a System/34 COBOL compiler. All of the text-handling code in ADVENT is non-portable, because back then FORTRAN didn't have reasonable support for arrays of characters. The number of characters that would pack into any given numeric type was implementation-dependent. On the PDP-10, that was five 7-bit ASCII characters per 36-bit word, with one bit left over. I think Fortran 77 fixed this problem, by defining an actual CHARACTER type. Unfortunately I haven't been in touch with Doug in over twenty years now; I have no idea whether he still has a copy of his RPG ADVENT. Which is a shame, because it would be nice to try it with the Eraseerhead RPG II compiler, which is GPL'd: http://rpg.eraserhead.net/ Eric [*] The original Colossal Cave Adventure game by Crowther and Woods, written in Fortran for the DEC PDP-10. Named "ADVENT" because the TOPS-10 operating system only allows for six-character filenames in SIXBIT code, which does not include lower case. [**] Or maybe it was RPG III. I don't really know what was available on the System/34 back in the late 1970s. [***} I'll bet you never expected to see "COBOL" and "reasonable language" in the same sentence, without an "isn't" between them. :-) Now I'm not saying that I *like* COBOL, but there are definitely some things that it is better-suited for than Fortran IV.