16 Mar
2017
16 Mar
'17
7:28 p.m.
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From: cctalk [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] on behalf of ben via cctalk [cctalk at
classiccmp.org]
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2017 9:28 PM
To: computer talk
Subject: Fwd: Re: Architectural diversity - was Re: Pair of Twiggys
On 3/16/2017 5:16 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
________________________________________
From: cctalk [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] on behalf of Chuck Guzis via cctalk
[cctalk at classiccmp.org]
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2017 6:08 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Architectural diversity - was Re: Pair of Twiggys
On 03/16/2017 02:54 PM, Ethan Dicks via cctalk wrote:
But was FORTRAN that portable?
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.
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.
Ben.
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Ummmm... I ran Fortran on a TRS-80 with no problems. I also ran it
on an LSI-11/02 under UCSD-Pascal. Of course, I ran COBOL on the
same systems. :-)
As for Universities. I worked on the academic systems at the Military
Academy at West Point. While the G&CS (Geography and Computer
Science) Department did have a VAX 11/750 running VMS (and Eunice)
the main academic machine when I got there was a Univac-1100 later
replaced by a bunch of Prime 850's.
bill
On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 5:42 PM, Cameron Kaiser
via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I'm one of the folks that works on LCDproc. Part of the release
testing I do is to compile it on things that aren't just "yet
another Linux box". Of all the use-cases, I'm pretty sure that it's
going to work on Debian-flavored things and if that ever breaks, it's
going to be the one thing that gets fixed first.
Sadly (or happily--take your choice), architectures aren't nearly as
diverse as they used to be. Ones complement, decimal, six-bit characters...
And people who weren't there can't understand why FORTRAN was the
closest thing to a "portable" language...
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Not even close to COBOL. :-)
bill
Porting
to diverse architectures is still a great way to find
latent bugs.
Too bad people can't be arsed to port merely to diverse *operating
systems*, let alone architectures.