RE: Re: Architectural diversity - was Re: Pair of Twiggys
> FORTRAN was, and still is, widespread, even if it doesn't look > anything like itself these days. On Sun, 19 Mar 2017, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: That's because, unlike the COBOL Professionals, the Fortran people drank from the OO KoolAid. Yes, there does exist an Object Oriented COBOL! Oh, and my 1401 only did Autocoder. I didn't start using Fortran until my Univac-1100 days. There wasn't a Fortran compiler for the 1401, but how much did they charge for the FORTRAN compiler?
RE: Re: Architectural diversity - was Re: Pair of Twiggys
From: cctalk [cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] on behalf of Rich Alderson via cctalk [cctalk@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
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. 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/
RE: Re: Architectural diversity - was Re: Pair of Twiggys
From: cctalk [cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] on behalf of ben via cctalk [cctalk@classiccmp.org] Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2017 9:28 PM To: computer talk Subject: Fwd: Re: Architectural diversity - was Re: Pair of Twiggys On 3/16/2017 5:16 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: > > > From: cctalk [cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] on behalf of Chuck Guzis via > cctalk [cctalk@classiccmp.org] > Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2017 6:08 PM > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > Subject: Re: Architectural diversity - was Re: Pair of Twiggys > > On 03/16/2017 02:54 PM, Ethan Dicks via cctalk wrote: >> On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 5:42 PM, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk >> wrote: Porting to diverse architectures is still a great way to find latent bugs. >>> >>> Too bad people can't be arsed to port merely to diverse *operating >>> systems*, let alone architectures. >> >> I'm one of the folks that works on LCDproc. Part of the release >> testing I do is to compile it on things that aren't just "yet >> another Linux box". Of all the use-cases, I'm pretty sure that it's >> going to work on Debian-flavored things and if that ever breaks, it's >> going to be the one thing that gets fixed first. > > Sadly (or happily--take your choice), architectures aren't nearly as > diverse as they used to be. Ones complement, decimal, six-bit characters... > > And people who weren't there can't understand why FORTRAN was the > closest thing to a "portable" language... > > __ > > Not even close to COBOL. :-) > > bill > But was FORTRAN that portable? 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. 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. Ben. _ U... I ran Fortran on a TRS-80 with no problems. I also ran it on an LSI-11/02 under UCSD-Pascal. Of course, I ran COBOL on the same systems. :-) As for Universities. I worked on the academic systems at the Military Academy at West Point. While the G&CS (Geography and Computer Science) Department did have a VAX 11/750 running VMS (and Eunice) the main academic machine when I got there was a Univac-1100 later replaced by a bunch of Prime 850's. bill
