PDP-8 Straight 8 restoration

[Diane Bruce]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 05:33:35PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 29, 2020, 5:10 PM Diane Bruce via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
> 
...
> 
> He was lucky the card deck was in order. One of my first jobs was to read
> in old, horrible FORTRAN IV from punch card, then check it against a
> listing the boss had and edit to match... This was the same place we wrote

A dropped card deck was disaster and how many folks filled in columns 73 to 80
with an index? Not very many. :-(

> malloc for FORTRAN and passed around all kinds of crazy data structures
> that offset into the malloc arena so it would run on both the pdp-11 and
> the vax...

Ah yes the LARGE array with indexes used as pointers trick. *ugh* I remember.

I also remember the implementation of Fortran on the university computer
one could abuse the assigned goto and have it execute your own assembler
code on the fly.  ;)

> 
> Warner
> 

Diane
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