I was in a nascent engineering course with some on-site engineering professors and others who commuted from MU (Columbia, MO) to UMKC (Kansas City) to teach nightly courses (all 3 hour courses were taught in one night). Our computer room was busy since it was dominated by business majors from the (H & R) Block School of Business. I took a “Fortran IV with WatFor and WatFiv” (“Wat” for University of Waterloo), a Fortran 66 (?) at UMKC back in 1972. I write everything in pencil since I’m so prone to mistakes, and those punch terminals are a royal pain! NO, I’M NOT GOING TO SAY, “THE COOD OLD DAYS” because it totally sucked. There were no “CRT terminals” for editing (where I was) as everything was done on punch terminals that resembled teletypes. That would also have come in handy in writing programs earlier since often ran out of line number “space” even though I followed the “golden rule” to use line numbers 10 counts apart. I found out when after tripping and spilling my “job” all over the floor at 2 AM, I was desperately sorting my cards and one of the computer room techs said: “just use the sorter”, to which I replied “the WHAT?”. I never got angry back then over the fact that the instructor did not tell us that a card sorter existed that we could use (I think you could specify the columns to use as line numbers since not all cards were for ForTran). infinite loops) in the school’s IBM360 mainframe (actually, I was at UMKC in Kansas City, MO and the jobs were remoted to MU in Columbia, MO), which caused another level of delay (I think they used “fast” 1200bps modems), critical if you were in a “hurry”. The “Wat”s (for Waterloo Ontario, CA) were required precompilers that would kick out errant “jobs” (e.g. I took “ForTran IV with WatFor and WatFiv” in 1972.
2AM THOUGHTS SOFTWARE
Posted in Retrocomputing, Software Development Tagged FORTRAN, retrocomputing Post navigation There are efforts to bring it even more up to date. Not everyone agrees, though, that Fortran is on the wane. Or, just fire up a browser if you want to play. But if you have some period hardware and want an authentic experience, it might just be the way to go. Honestly, as much time as we spent writing Fortran in years past, we don’t recommend it for new job prospects.
If you decide you want to have a go, there is, of course, GNU Fortran. Besides, there are many sophisticated algorithms you can borrow from decades of Fortran development. It is still a very capable language and very adept at crunching large sets of numbers. Pointers, dynamic memory allocation, and even objects are all possible. If you haven’t touched Fortran since the 1960s and 1970s, you should know that it has changed. On the other hand, we were impressed with how much they did squeeze in. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that we know Fortran - you probably aren’t going to be able to put it on your resume after watching this video. We didn’t think you could do much in that short amount of time, but we have to admit that they did a pretty good job. But reminds us that it was originally Fortran and promises to give you the essentials in 100 seconds. Usually, when we are talking about old computers, we are thinking of BASIC interpreters.
0 kommentar(er)
