Why was FORTRAN never offered for the Atari 8-bit?

[ACML]

I always wondered why a machine that was released in 1979 never had a FORTRAN offering.  I know Microsoft ventured into 8-bit with Microsoft BASIC and it never caught on or sold well.  I assume the Apple II had a FORTRAN offering.  In the 1980's, most college engineering students were all taking FORTRAN and not BASIC.  I took FORTRAN in 1983 using a DEC PDP-11 mainframe and would have loved to have the ability to work on it at home on my 32K 400 if it was available.  I guess it would only appeal to engineers and scientists, but heck, it would have been the same crowd using PASCAL and C, but those were 8-bit offerings.  How hard would it have been to port the Apple II version similar to what they did for VisiCalc?

 

  

[Rybags]

Looking it up, it would seem Fortran is fairly popular today.

But I remember it being surpassed by plenty of languages in the government/enterprise area back in the 80s/90s.  The likes of Cobol and database query languages like Natural and SQL became much more popular for producing applications.

Fortran at that time at least would have been more batch oriented in a time where things were moving to online processing.

 

I can remember installing the runtime libaries for it probably around 1993 in an IBM compatible mainframe environment but that was just to keep a few legacy applications going.  I don't think any active development was taking place on the site at the time.

 

As far as small computers go, I don't know that it'd be that useful.  I suspect it would have been fairly memory hungry and probably not optimised for small systems like ours as happened with some releases of Pascal, C and other compilable languages.

 

I also worked on a PDP-11 in school, not sure what model (it was terminal to a non-local machine) - I think it had 256K RAM and was a timesharing affair but remember that such minis like that had virtual memory and hard drives so could run exponentially bigger programs than our little micros.

[TGB1718]

From a quote:- Fortran (/ˈfɔːrtræn/; formerly FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.

Given it requires a compiler and numerical computation on the Atari was fairly slow I don't think it would have been a good match.

 

Also as @Rybags says, it would probably have needed much more RAM than that was available on the 8 bit or

at least a hard disk.

[+MrFish]

36 minutes ago, ACML said:

In the 1980's, most college engineering students were all taking FORTRAN and not BASIC.

 

This was still true in the 90's. I took Fortran in the mid to late 90's as an elective when I was working on my computer science degree; but all the other students in my class were taking it for engineering. I still have all the Fortran programs I wrote for the class.

 

Edited September 1, 2021 by MrFish

[Rybags]

Not sure about your country but I'm fairly sure here that the courses offered in those days tended to lag way behind what was in vogue at the time.

 

And yeah - if you consider computational ability as in doing floating-point stuff - the 6502 is somewhat weak in that area.

[+MrFish]

1 hour ago, ACML said:

I took FORTRAN in 1983 using a DEC PDP-11 mainframe and would have loved to have the ability to work on it at home on my 32K 400 if it was available.  

 

In my course, we used some Fortran 77 compatible version on 386 and 486 machines under DOS to do our programming. I was using a Mac at home during that time, and I don't recall having the language there. I'm pretty sure I would have sought out a copy to use at home; so I'm guessing nothing was available for the Mac -- at least in the pirated software world -- at that time.

 

Edited September 1, 2021 by MrFish

[+Cafeman]

40 minutes ago, Rybags said:

The likes of Cobol and database query languages like Natural and SQL became much more popular for producing applications.

Yep, I'm still making a living off these 3 languages!  The railroad I worked for had 1 remaining Fortran app which calculated dimensional clearances of railcars going through pinch points over miles and miles of track,;  but most other Fortran had been outsourced or replaced.  

 

Considering Fortran being usable on the Atari 8-bit computer line, I can't see how they'd really be up to the task. If you want to do the number-crunching that Fortran was built for, I doubt you run it on an 8-bit Atari computer. And Fortran probably wouldn't be able to do the interface and graphical things that even basic could do.

[ACML]

I am an Aerospace Engineer and still today see several software applications still written in FORTRAN.  These are usually large modeling (simulation, state variable models)  that were written many years ago.  They tend to be large and complicated.  The original creators are typically long retired and the new folks don't have the corporate knowledge to port it to a more modern language. Since it still works, they keep using it.  No one could reproduce it from scratch.  There are many folks that make a very good living because they can still modify and run old FORTRAN and COBOL programs.  

 

If the Apple II had it, why couldn't it have run on a 800?

 

[+MrFish]

Here's another AA thread on the subject.

 

Fortran 77 on the Atari 8 bit?

 

Edited September 1, 2021 by MrFish

[+MrFish]

There was a version of Fortran available for the C64 (Fortran-64 by Abacus).

 

You can find it here.

 

Commodore 64 Programming Languages and Operating Systems

 

[+Cafeman]

12 minutes ago, ACML said:

the Apple II had it, why couldn't it have run on a 800?

I've read the Apple II Fortran was not a 6502 compiler but ran on its Pascal foundation, something like that.  Anything is possible, but I wonder how usable Atari 8bit Fortran would really be, other than the at-home instruction benefit. 

[+Cafeman]

10 minutes ago, MrFish said:

There was a version of Fortran available for the C64 (Fortran-64 by Abacus)

 

That is kind of interesting, also I see a product called Nevada Fortran for C64. A subset of Fortran IV.  And C64 COBOL compilers too.  So somebody must have been using 8bit home computers to run their businesses. 

[TGB1718]

23 minutes ago, ACML said:

I am an Aerospace Engineer and still today see several software applications still written in FORTRAN.  These are usually large modeling (simulation, state variable models)  that were written many years ago.  They tend to be large and complicated.  The original creators are typically long retired and the new folks don't have the corporate knowledge to port it to a more modern language. Since it still works, they keep using it.  No one could reproduce it from scratch.  There are many folks that make a very good living because they can still modify and run old FORTRAN and COBOL programs.  

I worked for a major bank, I was writing programs in C on Unix platforms, running transactions to the mainframe, most programs

on the mainframe were written in Fortran and the guys on my team that supported it were contractors on stupidly huge rates

of pay all due to the fact the original programmers had left and no one knew how to make changes except these guys.

Both worked in the original team that wrote most of the code and themselves had left but came back as contractors.

[+DrVenkman]

30 minutes ago, ACML said:

I am an Aerospace Engineer

Same here, at least by undergrad degree and early career. When I worked for Boeing in the early 90’s, we were doing NASA contract work (Space Station Freedom). All the code was required to be done using Ada, of all things. Lots of company graybeards at the time bitched about that. A lot. ?

[+MrFish]

4 minutes ago, Cafeman said:

That is kind of interesting, also I see a product called Nevada Fortran for C64. A subset of Fortran IV.

 

This requires a CP/M (Z80) cartridge in order to run on the C64.

 

Commodore 64 CP/M Cartridge

 

[+MrFish]

32 minutes ago, MrFish said:

There was a version of Fortran available for the C64 (Fortran-64 by Abacus).

 

You can find it here.

 

Commodore 64 Programming Languages and Operating Systems

 

As suspected, this is not a full implementation.

 

[+Stephen]

Microsoft released a version of Fortran for CP/M.  That would have ran on a 64kB Z-80 system.  Was that a limited implementation?  I was amzed to see the MS coding tools for Z-80.  It was like their modern .NET stuff in a way, that an overall large project could have sum-modules coded in any of their languages (BASIC, ASM, COBOL, etc.)

 

[tschak909]

11 minutes ago, Stephen said:

Microsoft released a version of Fortran for CP/M.  That would have ran on a 64kB Z-80 system.  Was that a limited implementation?  I was amzed to see the MS coding tools for Z-80.  It was like their modern .NET stuff in a way, that an overall large project could have sum-modules coded in any of their languages (BASIC, ASM, COBOL, etc.)

 

Microsoft's Fortran-80 (and Fortran-86) were implementations of Fortran-66 aka Fortran-IV. Serviceable enough, but you do miss some of the niceties of Fortran-77.

 

And yeah, Microsoft's relocatable binary and library formats were de-facto standards, every language tool for CP/M had some support for them.

 

It's easy to forget that Microsoft released these tools for tons of operating systems under the sun, e.g. you could get them for ISIS (Intel's MDS monitor), Altair DOS, PT-DOS (Processor Technology DOS), HDOS (Heathkit H-8/H-89), MS/PC-DOS, every variant of CP/M, Xenix, and more that I'm not thinking of...

 

-Thom

Edited September 1, 2021 by tschak909

[tschak909]

Here's a vid of using the Microsoft Fortran and Link-80 under CP/M on #FujiNet:

 

[+MrFish]

4 hours ago, MrFish said:

This was still true in the 90's. I took Fortran in the mid to late 90's as an elective when I was working on my computer science degree; but all the other students in my class were taking it for engineering. I still have all the Fortran programs I wrote for the class.

 

I just had a look at some of the programs I wrote for the class, and they're all dated from spring quarter of 1995.

 

Edited September 1, 2021 by MrFish

[Faicuai]

3 hours ago, ACML said:

If the Apple II had it, why couldn't it have run on a 800?

Because there was absolutely no fundamental reason for it not being developed or simply ported to the 800/6502... other than (maybe) a large chunk of its potential audience being too busy playing Pinball, Ms. Pacman, and kiddie stuff alike.

 

Unless, of course, it actually ran on the Apple II off a special card with an on-board dedicated CPU+RAM just for Fortran, thanks to the machine's own architecture... 

[ClausB]

What's that, sonny boy?

 

I learned Fortran IV in 1975 and MS-BASIC IN '76. I have a gray beard.

[Keatah]

5 hours ago, Faicuai said:

Unless, of course, it actually ran on the Apple II off a special card with an on-board dedicated CPU+RAM just for Fortran, thanks to the machine's own architecture... 

There were several co-processor cards for the II. Z-80, 6809, 68000, 8088, 6502, and a couple of math-co's. But only the Z-80 became relatively popular and jumped out of the niche bucket where the others remained.

 

To answer the question directly. I might say it was simply an image thing. Fortran was likely viewed as being too technical for the home computer market.

 

 

[chevymad]

I took Fortran in the fall of 89. It was supposedly the last time the class would be offered at WSU. Was still a requirement for engineering when I was there though.

[+MrFish]

5 hours ago, ClausB said:

What's that, sonny boy?

 

I learned Fortran IV in 1975 and MS-BASIC IN '76. I have a gray beard.

 

Haha... I was a late bloomer in terms of attending college -- and programming, in general. I was 28 years old at the time I took Fortran. Not exactly a senior citizen yet; but I was getting up there, at least to most of the other college attendees around me.

 

I Learned BASIC and Atari programming on my own, though, at 19 years old.

 

Edited September 2, 2021 by MrFish