Structured Fortran

[Craig Ruff]

At NCAR there was a structured Fortran preprocessor named IFTRAN that was in use for a long time.  The earlier versions of the NCAR Local Network (NLNET), later renamed MASnet (Mainframe and Server network), as well as a variety of graphics packages were written in it.  I still have the IFTRAN to C translator I wrote to convert everything to C code so we didn’t have to spend money on Fortran compilers on the Unix boxes.

MASnet was a Hyperchannel cross bar network used for batch job submissions and data transfers to/from the Mass Storage Server (MSS), the supercomputers and the front end servers.  Eventually it was migrated to run on top of TCP/IP and Ethernet when the Hyperchannel hardware got expensive to maintain and comparatively slow.