🚀 go-pugleaf

>The IBM 704-709 series, which were the machines for which Fortran
>was written;

dpmccul@afterlife.ncsc.mil (Dean McCullough) writes:
>That is a strange statement, since I used Fortran on both the IBM 650
>and the IBM 1620.  Both of these machines predated the IBM 704.

Short history review: Fortran was indeed written for the 704 and the
mostly compatible 709, which were at the time IBM's fastest scientific
machines, being word-parallel binary machines with random access memory.
It quickly became popular and several versions of Fortran appeared for the
650, a slower but very reliable and popular digit serial decimal machine
which used a 12000 RPM drum* as its main memory. The 650 was contemporary
with the 704; work started on the 650 considerably earlier but both
shipped in 1954.  Probably the first 650 Fortran was FORTRANSIT which
translated Fortran to IT, the 650 Internal Translator language from
Carnegie Tech.

The 1620 was announced in 1959 as a replacement for the 650.  The 650, 704
and 709 were vacuum tube machines, while the 1620, arguably IBM's first
minicomputer, was all transistors.  By the time the 1620 came along
Fortran was the dominant language and all 1620s were shipped with a
Fortran compiler.

A good reference is "IBM's Early Computers," written by Bashe et al. (who
should know what they're talking about because they were there at the
time) and published by the MIT Press.

* - Yes, I said a 12,000 RPM drum.  Pretty amazing, eh?
-- 
John R. Levine, IECC, POB 349, Cambridge MA 02238, +1 617 492 3869
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