Architectural diversity - was Re: Pair of Twiggys
Bill Gunshannon
bill.gunshannon at hotmail.com
Sun Mar 19 10:04:05 CDT 2017
________________________________________
From: cctalk [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] on behalf of Rich Alderson via cctalk [cctalk at classiccmp.org]
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2017 3:07 PM
To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts'
Subject: RE: Re: Architectural diversity - was Re: Pair of Twiggys
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.
____________________________________________
That's because, unlike the COBOL Professionals, the Fortran people drank from
the OO KoolAid.
Oh, and my 1401 only did Autocoder. I didn't start using Fortran until my Univac-1100
days.
bill
More information about the cctalk
mailing list