Rich kids are into COBOL

Aw, come on, Dave. So long as it wasn't *any* manufacturer's Fortran, it was portable. The first textbook I used, _FORTRAN IV Primer_ by Elliott I. Organick, was filled with tables for all the various places that implementations differed among manufacturers. (That was where, in fact, I learned that there *were* manufacturers other than IBM.) No DEC systems were on the list. DEC was very careful to mark out where they had extended the language from the 1966 standard (and later from the 1977 standard, which included most of the DEC extensions to 1966). If you restricted yourself to the standard, Fortran was very portable, and that stood it in good stead for decades. Good programmers put any of the manufacturer specific code in subroutines which were easily replaced. Rich Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer Living Computer Museum 2245 1st Avenue S Seattle, WA 98134 mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/