Other Fortran-e-mails

David [Macklin], Gary [Mokotoff],

It’s so good to hear from both of you again!
Thank you for sharing your history/memories of your design, coding and delivery of 1401’s SPS, Autocoder, and inimitable 63-pass FORTRAN compiler!

While the 1401 design was tuned to be affordable business application computer (beginning with its WWAM data-path predecessor in mid 19050s), it was also the first widely available stored-program computer following half a century of unit-record equipment: One out of every two computers in the world by the mid 1960s was a 1401; it was many people’s first exposure to stored-program computing; the 1401 team predicted that it would become the world’s most popular stored-program computer; and just three weeks after announcement more 1401 were on order than all existing computers in the world. By all counts, it was an astonishingly successful and game changing computer.

Based on its popularity, it would make perfect sense to offer a FORTRAN compiler. Not all FORTRAN applications require a massive number of floating-point calculations. Some applications would — such as large-scale linear programming optimization — but even there, given how inaccessible/expensive the higher-performance/higher-cost 7000-class computers were — the 7090 population peaked at about 300 units, as did the 7070, both ~10x more expensive that a tape-based 1401 — it would also make economic sense to debug/try out a FORTRAN application on a 1401 first, then run lease time on a 7000 series for faster results on larger data sets.

As I forwarded from his 2008 email below, Dick Weaver felt that the 1401 FORTRAN tape "compiler became common:" "So June 1960, its all there. Punched card mindset, Fortran huge success, Fortran already running on a small punched card machine. It would have been automatic to ask for a Fortran implementation on a card 1401 - no matter how weird it might seem when viewed from 2008. That tape became common, that the mindset changed, probably happened only after 7330s began shipping (I couldn't find their announce/ship dates)”.

David, Gary —> Do you have any memories of how popular the 1401 Fortran compiler became? What type of FORTRAN programming it was employed for? (Educational, instructional, early debugging, small data sets, high-precision engineering calculations, etc.)?

Thanks for your insights(!),

- Robert

p.s. There is another nonagenarian from the 1401 era I’ve cc’d, Maurice Papo, who co-designed the WWAM in Paris in the mid 1950s, whose data paths were later straight-out borrowed by Fran Underwood to become the 1401/SPACE.

p.p.s. I understand your reaction to the adjective “glacial.” Alan noted that he was referring to 1401 FORTRAN compilation speed (not program execution speed), but I’m not sure what other computer(s)/compiler(s) he was comparing against or the size/complexity of those applications(s)?