[GreenKeys] Bletchley Park...FORTRAN

[Bob McConnell]

WA5CAB at cs.com wrote:
> FORTRAN.  What version is it up to these days?  Before my all expenses paid 
> vacation to SE Asia I took a FORTRAN course that was required for graduation.  
> When I survived and came home, I had to take a FORTRAN IV course in order to 
> graduate.  The only difference I can actually recall between the two was that 
> the former got run on a 1620 and the latter on a 360.  Those were the days when 
> undergraduates and most grad students handed in their punched cards and came 
> back the next day to learn what had happened.  I graduated and didn't do 
> anything further with computers until early in the PC era, going through early 
> Commodores, the 64 and 128, several CPM 2 and 3 machines and then into 8086 and 
> 80286 based machines all in the course of about two or three years (maybe it was 
> four years - old memories tend to compress in time).  But I never encountered 
> FORTRAN again.

I missed the first pass on that. In '69, while at Drexel Institute of 
Technology, I took an Intro to Fortran IV. The punched cards went to an 
IBM 2780 on the fifth floor which had a time share connection to a 360 
at the University of Pennsylvania. The results came back to a 3780, 
which printed them out.

On a good day you could submit a deck early in the morning and have the 
results by noon. If you skipped lunch to punch the corrections. you 
might get a second run back before they locked the doors for the day. 
But that only happened early in the quarter. As the number of 
submissions got larger, the cycle time got longer so it was best to 
start your assignments early.

There was also a quota for CPU time. On the bottom of each printout was 
an elapsed time statement that showed how much time this program used 
and how much time I had left for that quarter. I think the limit was 
four seconds, but I never used up even a full second for that course.

I dropped out later that year and signed up for two all expenses paid 
cruises to the Gulf of Tonkin. My draft notice caught up with me just 
after I got to Great Lakes NTC. "I survived" is a good way to describe it.

But while I was still in the service, around '74 or '75, a friend helped 
me learn BASIC on his terminal attached to a Honeywell 6060 at the Pearl 
Harbor shipyard. That lead me to the local Byte store where I learned 
8080 assembler on a Northstar Horizon by writing a couple of utilities 
for them.

I didn't get into computers professionally until 1980 when I was with 
NCR. They had some very interesting systems built around the Intel 8085 
at the time. They also taught me Pascal, PL/M and C while honing my 
assembler skills. I actually had CP/M running on some of their smaller 
boxes with the Hawk and Falcon hard drives. It was incredible to see 
4,996 kilobytes of data stored on one surface of a 15" platter. The 
Falcon had two fixed platters. The Hawk had one fixed and one removable. 
Their Phoenix drive would store 16 MB per surface, with 80 MB in a 
single removable cartridge. That was impressive back in the day.

Bob McConnell, Ex-RM2 NFIT, NLM
N2SPP