15 Jul
2015
15 Jul
'15
5:12 p.m.
On 07/15/2015 04:05 PM, Jay Jaeger wrote:
Paul adapted PUFFT (Purdue University Fast FORTRAN
Translator) to do
RS-232 bit serial I/O through a sense switch, and I wrote a spooling
program that ran on a Datacraft 6024 located in the same room to do the
card reading and printing. I suppose somewhere inside of it the DC 6024
was humiliated - I expect that it was much faster than the 7094 II. ;)
I remember PUFFT--that was Saul Rosen's baby, wasn't it? A FORTRAN for
undergrads--put in anything that *resembled* a FORTRAN statement and get
some sort of result. Missing parentheses? Misspelling? Outright
syntax errors? No problem. I think Purdue had two 709x systems for
PUFFT The CDC 6500 was reserved for Serious Work.
I understand that at the time, 7090/7094's were comparatively plentiful
and (comparatively) inexpensive, hence their use.
Liquid nitrogen would be the "or worse"
part. ;)
Neil had a lot of interesting stories about the ETA-10 (originally named
the GF-10 for the target of 10 gigaflops). It all seemed so fantastic
back then.
Ah, it's all fun...
--Chuck