Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

[Jim Breen <jimbreen@example.com>]

On 19 May 2014 22:16, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
> Simon Cozens writes:
>
>  > I have been wondering recently what is the oldest software still in common
>  > use.
>
> LISP and FORTRAN, pretty much a dead heat.

Fortran (I) was two years before LISP (1956 vs 1958).

I have a Fortran (I) manual from the original print run. There
are all the authors - McCarthy, Backus, et al.

In the mid-60s I did assembler on the IBM 7044, which was
the transistorized upgrade of the 704, for which Fortran was
written. Many of Fortran's instructions exist because they
mapped into the 704's instruction set without too much
effort. For example the old "arithmetic if" went straight
to the:

CAR word   # compare accumulator and storage
JMP loc1
JMP loc2
JMP loc3

LISP, of course, was originally written for the same platform.

Those were the days....

Jim

-- 
Jim Breen
Adjunct Snr Research Fellow, Japanese Studies Centre, Monash University