> On Mar 17, 2017, at 9:05 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk <[email protected]> > wrote: > > >> On Mar 16, 2017, at 9:28 PM, ben via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> 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. > > I know of FORTRAN implementations for one's complement machines with word > length of 24, 27, and 60 bits, decimal machines (IBM 1620), two's complement > machines of 12, 16, 48 bit words, just to pick a few. FORTRAN > implementations tended not to be all that demanding of resources: 4k words is > a typical minimum. > > I think a lot of high level languages are quite portable. ALGOL is not as > widely ported but not because it's inherently harder. PASCAL was ported to > many different machines too. C is a bit of an anomaly because it's more like > a high level assembly language, so it has portability limitations that many > other high level languages don't run into. > > paul >
I just released a new version of the CDC 1700 simulator for SIMH. This is a one’s complement, 16-bit machine and the Fortran compiler is now functional in 16KW of available space (a smaller version (12KW) was available but I don’t know if any copies survived). The source code for the compiler is available on Bitsavers - it’s written mostly in Fortran. John.
