17 Mar
2017
17 Mar
'17
12:07 p.m.
From: ben
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2017 6:28 PM
On 3/16/2017 5:16 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk
wrote:
> From: Chuck Guzis
> Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2017 6:08 PM
>> And people who weren't there can't
understand why FORTRAN was the closest
>> thing to a "portable" language...
> Not even close to COBOL. :-)
Preach it, brother!
But was FORTRAN that portable?
Yes.
Other than the IBM 1130 I cannot think of a small
computer that had ample I/O
and memory to run and compile FORTRAN. All the other 16 bitters seem to more
paper tape I/O.
The PDP-8 family has compilers for both FORTRAN II and FORTRAN IV. 16 bits?
What could we possibly do with all that address space? ;-)
I suspect 90% of all university computers ended up as
IBM 360 systems. A few
ended up with the VAX, but who knows what they ran.
FORTRAN. FORTRAN D (DOS/360), F and G (OS/360), which were FORTRAN IV
compilers (retronamed "Fortran 66"). VAX/VMS Fortran 77, except most VAXen of
the day you seem to be talking about ran BSD Unix and Fortran was handled by
f2c.
I learned FORTRAN IV on an IBM 1401, a decimal computer, before moving on to
PL/1 and COBOL (and FORTRAN) on the System/360.
FORTRAN was, and still is, widespread, even if it doesn't look anything like
itself these days.
Rich
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134
mailto:RichA at LivingComputers.org
http://www.LivingComputers.org/