On 17 January 2014 12:18, John Ehrman <[email protected]> wrote: > FORMAC was a symbolic computation, algebraic manipulation system writtten > (I believe) in PL/I. All symbolic algebra systems I know of require > variable-precision arithmetic. (I wrote a couple of System/360 assembler > subroutines for George Collins' SAC-1 system in the early 1970s.)
There is a version of FORMAC available on the CBTTAPE site from the old SPLA tapes. It appears to be written in PL/I and assembler, so I'm not sure how it relates to what's been discussed so far. It takes a bit of digging: it's in the big (389 MB) file at http://cbttape.org/ftp/SPLA/SPLA.zip Then in that zip file it's listed in splatape.txt as PROG=033013 FILES=15 AT=107 TAPE=603 meaning your choice of AWSTAPE.SPL603.HETUTL.AWS or AWSTAPE.SPL603.VTT2DISK.AWS (whichever decompresses correctly for you), and then within that AWS file it is the 15 files starting at file 107. These appear to be IEHMOVE-unloaded datasets. If someone is sufficiently interested, but without the resources to decode the AWS files, I could decode it all and post it somewhere more easily accessible. From the context I would guess that this is in the public domain. But of course I Am Not A Lawyer, etc. etc. Here's the doc submitted to SPLA: ================================== 360D 03.3.013 360D 03.3.013 SHARE FORMAC/FORMAC73 Version A.77 Author: Dr. Knut A. Bahr Direct Technical Inquiries to: H.D. Knoble 214 Computer Building The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802 Description FORMAC (formula manipulation compiler) is a symbolic algebraic manipulation system capable of taking general partial derivatives, performing exact rational arithmetic, and in general enabling many tedious algebra and calculus problems to be computerized. SHARE FORMAC/FORMAC73 is a maintenance and extension effort as published in the February 1974 issue of the SIGSAM Bulletin by Knut Bahr. The system is written in 360 Assembler language and runs on 360/370 hardware under OS or VS/370. Meaningful programs can be run in a 140K byte region. Programming Language Assembler, PL/I (F) Minimum System Requirements 360 Model 50, 140K bytes core, PL/I (F) Documentation Only: Not available. Submittal/Revision Date: 2/78 ================================== Tony H.
