Help reading a 9 track tape
Paul Koning
paulkoning at comcast.net
Mon Aug 2 15:16:49 CDT 2021
> On Aug 2, 2021, at 4:14 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> On 8/2/21 12:19 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
>>> On Aug 2, 2021, at 11:11 AM, James Liu via cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Thanks for feedback and offers to assist. I received the tape from
>>> one of the maintainers of Schoonship at CERN, and it was probably made
>>> around 1978 at SLAC.
>>>
>>> For some background, Tini Veltman developed Schoonship in the 1960's
>>> at CERN on the CDC 6600. My understanding is that he more or less
>>> insisted on coding in assembly since he thought FORTRAN or other high
>>> level languages would just get in the way and slow things down.
>> Depending on what he was trying to do that may well be a valid assessment. CDC Fortran was known to be pretty good, but Fortran is not the obvious answer for implementing interpreters or other language processors, which this sounds like.
>
> Some might argue with you about that. PL/M was done in Fortran IV.
Interesting. So was IBM Fortran H, if I remember right. And I talked to a DEC engineer who built an expression parser in COBOL. Still, these are not the usual case.
paul
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