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. Rich Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer Living Computers: Museum + Labs 2245 1st Avenue S Seattle, WA 98134 mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org http://www.LivingComputers.org/