Lisa C and Lisa FORTRAN

On Fri, 7 May 2010, Dan Gahlinger wrote: Now THAT is much more credible. Dan has now acknowledged that some of the source information that he was given could be flawed. Valtrep was introduced to Dan as being a/THE predecessor of FORTRAN. Dan is merely honestly passing on what was told TO him. The person who TOLD Dan that may have been mistaken ("That's what they told me"), exaggerating ("Oh, yeah. This machine predates the existence of DEC",. . . ), or lying. How accurate are the details we were told about the "PDQ FORTRAN" that we used on a 1620 in a college in 1967? Was that even really a 1401 in the next room, or some related model? 20+ years later, I was given a damaged 24" disk platter, and told that it came from THAT 1401. Recently folk with far more experience on those machines have told me "no way", and that therefore what I had been telling my students for recent years wasn't accurate. In terms of being noticably more primitive, let me offer a hypothesis of an honest way that Dan could be mistaken: It is not at all uncommon for universities to proudly use software, including compilers, that were written by students there. Such student written materials may be quite a bit cruder, and lacking many refinements. Did your first attempt at writing a C compiler include floating point? It may not always be feasable to differentiate between earlier software V modern early efforts by talented programming students. After all, that seems to be how we ended up with the UCSD Pascal and P-System, in which certain characteristics are noticably more primitive than much of the commercial software of the time, while certain other characteristics may be novel and innovative. What was the purported relationship between Valtrep and "Speed-Coder"? We may never know all of the details, and we've seen how WWW is still extremely porous in its information. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com