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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Little old machines, The joy of FORTH (not)
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2024 02:18:46 -0000 (UTC)
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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.

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.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly