Fwd: Re: Architectural diversity - was Re: Pair of Twiggys

[ben]

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:
>> On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 5:42 PM, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk
>> <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>
>> 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...
>
> __________________________________________
>
> Not even close to COBOL.  :-)
>
> bill
>

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.