July 2008 Archives

Joel Plaice and Associates has full flight simulators for sale, including KLM CAE 737-300 (EFIS), CAE MD-90, CAE A310-200, CAE MD-11. A Rediffusion sim is under contract. The photos are fun to browse -- old computers, old image generators, old and massive disk units. They also have old spares.

SimCon offers a tool for porting old proprietary* Fortran to standardized Fortran that can run on Windows or Linux. This article lists issues specific to the Gould SEL Fortran compiler -- a good summary of its peculiarities:

• DATAPOOL
• Variable name oddities: use of underscores, ignoring anything after eight characters
• Not crashing on divide-by-zero
• Allowing size mismatches of REAL arguments
• SELECT CASE and DO UNTIL control structures
• Non-standard hexadecimal constants
• Interactive program control

And here is a walk-through, with screenshots, of using their WinFPT tool to migrate Gould Fortran into something that will compile under Windows or Unix.

* I'm reminded of a long-ago presentation at Burtek, prepared by Matt Narotam, Ph.D., about the advantages of Ada. One of those advantages was standardization, as opposed to all the mutations of Fortran that had emerged since the Fortran 77 standard. The bullet point on the slide read "Deviants of Fortran." Ed Wilson, the Ada Simulator Validation Program manager, said that sounded like the name of a movie showing at the Olde Tyme Cinema (a blue movie house south of 15th on the east side of Sheridan).