27 Sep
2014
27 Sep
'14
5:07 p.m.
On 09/27/2014 03:11 PM, ben wrote:
I think that FORTRAN was portable only if you had a
main frame around
and a IBM card reader.
It depends. There were a lot of cross-assemblers written in FORTRAN.
Some could be run on non-binary, non-ASCII, non-8-bit character machines.
Let's see 'C' do that.
Usually, the first couple of statements in such a program were:
INTEGER CHARS( 64)
READ 100, CHARS
100 FORMAT( 64A1)
The first record in the input would be the character set used for the
remainder of the program.
I think a lot of young-uns are unaware of exactly how different 60s and
70s systems could be from one another. S/360 does not represent the
beginning of time by a long shot.
--Chuck