Computer history

A few interesting links related to computer history.

• General
  • alt.folklore.computers FAQ (including "NASA probe that was destroyed because of a typo", see as well this page)
  • The Virtual Museum of Computing
  • Interesting Links to Computing History
  • The Jargon File
  • Karl Kleine's Historic Documents in Computer Science
  • Al Kossow's manual collection
• Fortran
  • Papers:
    • IBM Fortran Manual for the 704
    • Fortran Automated Coding System For the IBM 704 and other historical documents
    • The Fortran I Compiler, David Padua, Computing in Science & Engineering, January 2000, Volume 2, Issue 1, pp. 70-75
    • Fortran and the Space Program, Jack Crenshaw, Fortran Source, Lahey Inc., Volume 16 Issue 1, Spring 2000
    • The Fortran (not the foresight) saga: the light and the dark, Brian Meek, Fortran Forum, Vol 9 No 2, October 1990, pp 23-32
    • PCFORT A Fortran-to-Pcode Translator, technical report no. 160, January 1979, computer systems laboratory, Stanford University
    • History of FORTRAN and FORTRAN II, Paul McJones
  • Some intestesting posts on usenet:
    • The announcement of the first Fortran 90 compiler in 1991: the NAGWare compiler written by Malcolm Cohen in about 18 months.
    • References on Fortran history by Michael Metcalf
    • The listing of the Indiana University FASTRAN compiler.
  • Compilers available with source:
    • Fortran 66
      • pfort
        B. G. Ryder (1974), The PFORT Verifier, Software Practice and Experience, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 359-377.
        source code
    • Fortran 77

      • Original Unix f77, f2c
        Stu Feldman wrote in the late seventies the original Fortran 77 compiler for Unix. Its source is available as part of some ancient unix versions (from Version 7 onwards, 1979) in "The Unix Archive". Various text books and papers cite this work (including Bentley's "Programming pearls" (Addison Wesley 1986, 1999)). Like many early vendor's Fortran 77 compilers on unix, f2c derived from it (source available). It was first made available on netlib in November 1989.

        Unix Seventh Edition Manual is available and includes the "man page" of f77 dated "1 August 1978". The introduction reads:

        A Portable Fortran 77 Compiler
        S. I. Feldman, P. J. Weinberger
        The Fortran language has just been revised. The new language, known as Fortran 77, became an official American National Standard on April 3, 1978. We report here on a compiler and run-time system for the new extended language. This is believed to be the first complete Fortran 77 system to be implemented. This compiler is designed to be portable, to be correct and complete, and to generate code compatible with calling sequences produced by C compilers.

      • GNU g77 compiler
        GCC contains g77, a fortran 77 front-end written from scratch by James Craig Burley (1990 usenet announcement). g77 was replaced by the GNU Fortran 95 compiler when gcc 4.0 was released in April 2005.
      • Watcom compilers
        Sybase announced in August 2000 their intention to open source the Watcom compilers (C++ and Fortran 77). The source was made public in May 2002 and the first release made available in February 2003.
      • Robert Moniot's ftnchek
      • Toolpack
        TOOLPACK contains a Fortran 77 front-end written in Fortran.
    • Fortran 90/95
      • SGI compilers
        SGI open-sourced under the GPL in May 2000 their compiler technology including the Cray Fortran 90 front-end and run-time libraries. This represents the state-of-the-art at that date. SGI discontinued it in August 2001. In September 2001, Open64 started from the source base of Pro64. The " Open Research Compiler" (repository) is another effort to carry on with the compiler development.
      • GNU Fortran 95 compiler
        g95, lead by Andrew Vaught, started in March 2000 (usenet announcement).
        In January 2003, Andrew Vaught decided to develop g95 single-handedly with occasional source code releases. Consequently, the project forked and a new project, gfortran, was integrated first in an experimantal branch of GCC then in the main line.
• C/C++
  • Dennis Ritchie has a lot of historical material (including two resurrected primeval C compilers from 1972-73, including source).
  • Compilers available with source:
    • gcc: the GNU compiler
    • Chris Fraser and David Hanson's lcc: a retargetable compiler for ANSI C
    • sdcc: Small Device C Compiler
    • cc65: "the 6502 C compiler"
    • kcc: Kok Chen's PDP-10 C compiler
    • Fabrice Bellard's Tiny C compiler
    • TenDRA (1, 2)
    • BDS C
• Old production code
  • Digital Research Source Code including the source to an Intel PLM compiler written in Fortran 66.
    For record, after minor modifications, it should build properly with any Fortran 95 compiler.
  • Crystallography Source Code Museum
• Old games
  • Adventure
  • Interactive Fiction (game source code)

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