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From: Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Little old machines, The joy of FORTH (not)
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2024 13:25:38 -0700
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John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
> According to Peter Flass  <peter_flass@yahoo.com>:
>>> My first computer was a 12K (BCD charactersw) IBM 1401 running FORTRAN IV.
>>> Better compiler writers in those days...
> 
> Luxury!  Mine was a PDP-8 with 4K 12-bit words and low speed paper tape.  It had
> a Fortran system but it wasn't worth the effort.  We mostly used FOCAL, which
> was sort of a cut down Joss, and a homebrewed Trac interpreter.
> 
>> OK, I surrender. Somewhere I have a book about the first FORTRAN compiler
>> for (I think) the 704. Those guys were geniuses.
> 
> You're probably thinking of Abstracting Away the Machine, self-published
> by Mark Jones Lorenzo.  It's pretty good.

Yes, thanks.

> 
> Even by modern standards the original Fortran compiler generated very respectable
> code.  If could do loop merging, turning two nested loops into one when the indexes
> were used in simple enough ways.
> 



-- 
Pete