Bob Bemer, who I communicated with recently regarding the Fortran “Tome”, died of cancer on June 22 at his home on Possum Kingdom Lake in Texas. He was the “father of ASCII” and one of the first to point out the “Y2K” problem (as far back as 1970). Many sources carried the [...]
I learned that Peter Zilahy Ingerman, PhD, was the donor of the Fortran II listing at The Smithsonian. Peter published a number of books and papers in the area of programming languages and compilers.
I called Peter and had a very pleasant conversation. It turned out he’d donated the Fortran materials to The Smithsonian [...]
I followed a link from Frank da Cruz’s IBM 704 page at Columbia to George Michael’s 704 page, which is part of his Stories of the Development of Large Scale Scientific Computing. I sent an email asking if George or his colleagues remembered the Fortran “Tome”.
George replied:
1. I do not recall any book called the [...]
Earlier I had learned that Paul Pierce’s web site contains images of a number of system tapes for old IBM mainframes. Paul provides some utilities he wrote for making sense of these old tapes, which were written on 7-track drives, with 6-bit BCD characters and 36-bit words.
Tonight I came across Rob Storey’s web site. [...]
Every so often I try again to communicate with the Smithsonian. Eventually, I was able to make contact with Alicia Cutler, a Specialist in the Collection of Computers & Mathematics. She ran a search for me in their internal catalog, which produced a 12-page listing of documents related to Fortran. Three of [...]
J.A.N. Lee has had successive careers in civil engineering and computer science, and has been active in the history of computing for many years (see for example FORTRAN’s Twenty-Fifth Anniversary). He responded to my email saying, “I have asked about the original FTN compiler several times but without any success. Two sources would [...]