This week’s episode of BBC Radio’s Digital Planet show includes a short segment on the 50th anniversary of Fortran. The presenter, Gareth Mitchell, interviewed me last week and about 4 minutes of that interview are included.
If you’re interested, the show will be broadcast at various times December 18 and 19 (today and tomorrow); local schedules [...]
As an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s, I first learned of John Backus and his work on Fortran, BNF, and Algol. Around 1972 or 1973 I attended a talk John gave on “variable-free programming” at Berkeley. I was fascinated by programming languages (having worked on implementations of Snobol4, [...]
An upcoming release of Bob Supnik’s SIMH (Computer History Simulation system) will include IBM 704/709/7090/7094 simulation provided by Rich Cornwell. Rich has been very busy lately: implementing and debugging the simulations of the CPU, channels, controllers, and devices; tracking down and transcribing source code for diagnostics; and figuring out how to rebuild and run various [...]
I’ve added another important document to the Fortran I/Fortran II collection at the Computer History Museum:
Anonymous. FORTRAN I, II, and 709 : Customer Engineering Manual of Instruction. IBM Corporation, Form R23-9518-0, February 1959, 67 pages. Copy belonging to Mark Halpern. PDF
This document is filled with useful information for anyone interested in digging into [...]
I just posted a scan of the three-volume listing of the IBM 704 FORTRAN II compiler to the History of FORTRAN and FORTRAN II web site at the Computer History Museum. This listing was donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History by Peter Z. Ingerman. When I last reported on it, I was [...]
I have the pleasure of thanking ACM for granting permission to post the full texts of five ACM-copyrighted articles to the FORTRAN/FORTRAN II web site at the Computer History Museum. Here they are; for those already in the ACM Digital Library, we also link to the canonical ACM version via its DOI (Digital Object [...]
I recently updated this item of the History of FORTRAN web site at the Computer History Museum to include an online copy of the video:
FORTRAN 25th anniversary film, 1982, 12.5 minutes. Computer History Museum lot number X2843.2005, donated by Daniel N. Leeson. Windows Media Video (12.8 megabytes)
(Daniel N. Leeson describes this film in his article [...]
By comparing three versions of the memo (unsigned, but believed written by Irv Ziller) “Proposed Specifications for FORTRAN II for the 704″, dated August 28, September 25, and November 18, 1957, you can watch the design of the subroutine feature of FORTRAN II unfold. The original FORTRAN system (see here or here) had a variety [...]
My efforts to track down source code and documents from the original IBM 704 FORTRAN project have been one of the pilot projects of the Software Collection Committee at the Computer History Museum. I’m starting to assemble a web site at the Museum to organize and present the materials I’ve collected so far. I’d [...]
I have been negligent in reporting impressive progress made by Dave Pitts emulating IBM 7090 software. As Leif Harcke posted to alt.folklore.computers and bit.listserv.ibm-main on 2 February 2005:
Dave has developed his “asm7090″ cross-assembler to the point where it can assemble the core of IBSYS from MAP source. The resultant IBSYS image will run the [...]
In January, Peter Capek told me that while cleaning up a file cabinet in his home he’d come across:
… a detailed description of the FORTRAN compiler, dated in 1960, and explicitly distinguishing between the 704 and 709 versions, but covering both. It looks like it was typed and what I have is probably not [...]
Last Friday, Bob Abeles posted a comment here saying:
The IBSYS tapes on Paul Pierce’s site contain the source for FAP, FORTRAN II, FMS (version that ran under IBSYS), plus lots of other goodies. I wrote a program several years ago that extracts the sources. I’ll try to dig it up this weekend and will post [...]
I expect most Dusty Decks readers are aware of alt.folklore.computers, but it’s worth noting Rob Storey’s recent post IBM 7094 Emulator now runs Fortran compiler. As I posted in June, Rob has written a IBM 7094 emulator. Through the work of James Fehlinger, the emulator can load and execute the compiler, and [...]
The effort in creating this weblog was quickly rewarded in the form of comments and email from readers. First Micah Nutt, son of Roy Nutt, commented that his family has possession of Roy’s collection of business documents and memorabilia, including some Fortran-related microfiche mentioned by Daniel N. Leeson. Micah told me:
The fiche I [...]
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 [...]
Tom Van Vleck had suggested I contact Jean Sammet. Jean has published extensively on programming languages and their history. (Her book, Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals, has been called the definitive work on early computer language development.)
I eventually found a current email address for her; today she responded that she didn’t know where to [...]
I ran across an article “The Fortran I Compiler” by David Padua in Computing in Science and Engineering, Volume 2, Number 1, (January/February 2000). It begins, “The Fortran I compiler was the first demonstration that it is possible to automatically generate efficient machine code from high-level languages. It has thus been enormously influential. This [...]