This topic was created by jake .
Sometimes it's the journey, not the destination :-)
I restore old shit as a form of meditation. Cars, boats, bikes, cycles, aircraft, computers, farm equipment pre-steam age & steam, name it ... Some stays with me, some is sold, and some gets loaned to museums.
However, my nieces & nephews are learning about the history of programming as a result (so did my daughter) The oldest niece is soaking in assembly language (multiple CPUs, ancient & modern) at a dizzying rate, and she's also pretty good in Cobol & Fortran. My oldest nephew is a whiz in Cobol & Fortran, and getting help from his cousin in assembler. All the kids have to use Windows at school, but I'm slowly teaching them how the clusterfuck came to be, starting with DOS 0.96 beta and all variations through the early world of Windows.
Why? They are interested, that's why. And someone in the next generation is going to make a fortune maintaining the now 40+ year old code that most of the nation's infrastructure runs on ... as my daughter is discovering already :-)
I have two separate card decks, and Mylar tape, for the final version of Amdahl FORTRAN IV. They all match from a ones & zeros perspective. I have archived them to more modern media.
IBM's lawyers tell me that they are still the owners, and will sue the shit out of me if I release it into the wild.
Seems that .gov & .mil contractors still use it.
I'm allowed to own access to the source, to archive it, and to run it off-line, but not to distribute it.
The mind absolutely boggles ...
Fujitsu has basically told me "whatever, dude, go with your bliss" :-)
hehe yeah that sounds like big blue...
I've been asking alot of .mil contractors for the particular bit of code i'm after. It was written by a W(ar) G ames......and declassified but still no dice.
It wasnt Fortran itself which i have but a snippet of code written under it. Its amazing how touchy most people are over 40 year old code.
Enjoy your big iron!!, hope you've got a big fortran library theres loads of code to run :)
and dont drop that card deck!!!
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