CORTRAN(ID:7776/)Cornell FORTRANfor CORnell FORTRAN Simplified version of FORTRAN IV brought to you by the people who made PL/C Places References: Instructional Computing More about the Use of CORC Although Lesser provides some interesting information about the use of the Burroughs 220 and the Control Data 1604 computer for course work by students, additional information may provide a better sense of the practices at the time and the load volume generated. When the CORC process started, it could be considered rather archaic?students did not prepare their own input but wrote their programs on specially prepared coding sheets that facilitated both the writing and the transfer to punch cards by professional keypunch operators. Figure 2 gives a sense of the situation. The original caption for this pictorial in a Cornell Computing Center publication circa 1963 was: With the CORC simplified computing language, all Cornell students can make use of the Computing Center. After a student has completed his program descriptions, it is punched on cards by the center staff; run though the computer; then returned to the center laboratory for correction and resubmission by the students when necessary. [...] At the time it was the practice to record initial runs, that is the first run after the program deck was punched by keypunch staff, and the reruns, which were subsequent runs after corrections were made by students and until the program produced the expected results. One measure of the growth is that initial runs increased by 2.5 times from 1962?63 to 1965?66. Reruns showed a four-fold increase over this same period. These increases give witness to the increasing use of the computer in the instructional programs at the university. Extract: CORTRAN CORTRAN CORTRAN was developed to provide a complement to CORC for student use as well as for researchers who were interested in low-cost, fast turnarounds for their Fortran jobs. A team of staff and student programmers under the leadership of Bessel developed CORTRANd as an in-core version of the Fortran compiler provided by Control Data. The availability of CORTRAN not only improved services at the center but conserved resources and improved the performance of the 1604 system. Extract: CORC, CUPL, PL/C Introduction of PL/C One of the primary languages for introductory computing instruction changed from CUPL to PL/C. Conway and his various associates, who had developed CORC in the early 1960s then CUPL in the late 1960s, now followed with PL/C as the language of choice for this purpose. (CORC was used from 1962 to 1966 on both the Burroughs 220 and the Control Data 1604, while CUPL was used from 1965 to 1969 on both the Control Data 1604 and IBM 360/65.) Adopting PL/C was in keeping with the computing industry trend to adopt the PL/I language for more applications. IBM commissioned Conway13 and his associates to develop a student version of PL/I, which was named PL/C, and provided the initial support that was also supplemented by support from Seimens. The development of PL/C was built on the previous experience noted above as well as new technologies, so when completed it was the first high-performance compiler with advanced error-correcting techniques for a subset of the PL/I language. Once under way, the project was partially funded by income from sales. In 1970–71 more than 100 copies of PL/C had been distributed, and 60 sales had been made. Later in the decade, at its peak, PL/C was used at 250 universities around the world, according to Conway. Members of the team that produced the first PL/C release were Conway, Howard Morgan, R. Wagner, and five graduate students in Computer Science, the principal one being Tom Wilcox. |