[GreenKeys] Bletchley Park...FORTRAN

[Randy or Sherry Guttery]

Bob McConnell wrote:

> But while I was still in the service, around '74 or '75, a friend helped 
> me learn BASIC on his terminal attached to a Honeywell 6060 at the Pearl 
> Harbor shipyard. That lead me to the local Byte store where I learned 
> 8080 assembler on a Northstar Horizon by writing a couple of utilities 
> for them.

I "backed" into computers a different way... I learned on a very 
different sort of machine a highly specialized processor. While it 
contained a digital section - and was controlled by a digital program - 
it was really more of an analog computer than digital. The Verdan 
computer was designed by autonetics as a navigation computer with it's 
heritage coming from the Redstone Rocket guidance system. A pocket 
calculator today is far more powerful and faster than those computers in 
doing "math" - BUT where they really shone was their ability to "read" 
and integrate vast amounts of incoming analog data very, very accurately.

Here is more on them:

<http://tendertale.com/tttj/tttj2-5.html>

Scroll down just a bit.

Anyway - working with these - I learned to do some simple programming, 
never got as far as I wanted to go... just didn't have the time. One of 
my "collateral" duties was the management of the test equipment pool for 
the submarines.  If they had some equipment fail calibration, my job was 
to get it fixed, calibrated and back to them.  If that couldn't be done 
before they sailed - I had a full compliment of all of the gear they 
carried - and would loan them one from the pool until they got back - 
and theirs (now repaired and calibrated) returned to them.  When I first 
took over managing the inventory - it was kept on paper - and not very 
well - as it was very easy to miss things since there were several 
places various things had to be logged (location, due dates for 
calibration, who had it on loan, what we had of theirs to be returned, 
etc.).  I decided that it'd be easier to keep all of this data on IBM 
cards - each card representing each piece of equipment.  I eventually 
also set up a similar system for the test, handling and calibration 
equipment for the Special Weapons Division of Naval Weapons Station 
Yorktown. It didn't involve much programming - mostly duplicating the 
"deck", and sorting them into various sub-decks. The current "due" 
sub-deck was then run through a printer to print out the coming month's 
"recall list" for items needing inspection, maintenance and calibration. 
I received a personal letter of accommodation for my work with that - 
and it became one of the prototypes for computerizing the calibration 
recall system Navy wide several years later. Seems like we ran the cards 
on a System 3 onboard Proteus - I don't recall what the system was at 
NWS Yorktown - as at the Division office we only had keypunch, sorters 
and printers - the computer was across the base somewhere - I don't 
think I ever saw it.

About this time - the Apple ][ was just hitting the street - as was 
RadioShack's TRS-80.  I looked at both - but after having used the 
larger systems, didn't think much of them... they seemed too limited.

I got out of the Navy in 78 - and it wasn't long until I was looking for 
another computer. Again I looked at what was "out there" - and a kit 
looked interesting... it wasn't all that powerful - but it was 
expandable and being a kit - affordable - barely.

Sherry and I spent the next couple of weeks soldering together our 
NorthStar Horizon. Z80 4Mhz - 16K Ram (thats KB not MB). The next board 
was a RAM expansion board - again a kit - and defective - on purpose. 
At the time RAM was unbelievably expensive 64KB was several Grand (yes 
$2K+). NorthStar had figured out that they could buy up a manufacturers 
"duds" - which usually had a bad bit(s) in only 1/2 the memory map--- 
and what they'd do - is put together a "set" of RAM chips in which all 
of the bits in the lower (or upper) half were good - and only use that 
half.  So you could buy a 32K RAM kit (yes still soldering a bajillion 
joints) for a mere $599.00. So for several years - we had a 48K Horizon 
- running (at first) NorthStar DOS and BASIC.  Later we switched to CP/M 
and WordStar, dBase II, and SuperCalc. Around 1982 The Horizon was 
upgraded to TurboDOS - and became an 8/16 - capable of supporting both 
the Z80 and 8086 (16 bit) boards.  The original Z80 and RAM became 
"system server central processor" - and individual Z80 8Mhz "user 
boards" - complete computers on a single board were dropped in. The 
server Z80 managed the drives (floppies, hard disk, printers and shared 
serial ports); while each user board (up to 8) had it's own terminal and 
could run it's own program. MS state bought one of these - as by this 
time the Horizon was running five versions of BASIC; UCSD Pascal; COBOL; 
  Fortran; and two Assemblers - one supporting Pascal, COBOL, Fortran 
and CBasic; the other some new language called "C"...   As the 
supporting tech - of course I got  (official) copies of all of these... 
Still have them - though I haven't looked at them in years.  Still have 
6 or 7 running Horizons - three are full 8/16s - and most still run - at 
least last time I plugged one in.  It's been several years - they may 
need some "encouragement" to get going these days.

Never really got a good handle on Fortran (or COBOL either, for that 
matter)...  CB80 and Pascal were the "coming things"... and they were 
what I spent a lot of time on.

Yeah - brings back a lot of memories...

Oh, yeah as long as we're doing "old stuff" and "old movies" (the Forbin 
Project) - the same night we saw that movie- it was a double feature 
with another flick: "The Andromeda Strain"... and (here's how I redeem 
myself by (almost) getting back on topic): IIRC - it was a Model 28 that 
almost caused (or allowed) a disaster in that movie... What a pair for 
some nightmares those two were!

best regards...
-- 
randy guttery

A Tender Tale - a page dedicated to those Ships and Crews
so vital to the United States Silent Service:
http://tendertale.com