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History of Salford and Silverfrost
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PaulLaidler
Site Admin


Joined: 21 Feb 2005
Posts: 7916
Location: Salford, UK

PostPosted: Thu Oct 01, 2009 7:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Colour printing is on the wish list for Plato. It is just something I have not got round to yet. It is a fairly straight forward addition but not trivial.
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LitusSaxonicum



Joined: 23 Aug 2005
Posts: 2388
Location: Yateley, Hants, UK

PostPosted: Thu Oct 01, 2009 9:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

John,

I'll believe it when I see it for myself.

Eddie
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Robert



Joined: 29 Nov 2006
Posts: 444
Location: Manchester

PostPosted: Thu Oct 01, 2009 9:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

> FTN95 appeared likely one or two years later, when Salford finished the contract with NAGbut FTN90 was real.

Paul pointed out to me that Salford did sell it with our backend. I added the debug support so you would have thought I would remember...

We also had a Sheffield Pascal for DBOS. Didn't sell many though.
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aebolzan



Joined: 06 Jul 2007
Posts: 229
Location: La Plata, Argentina

PostPosted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 2:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

SHEFFIELD PASCAL FOR DBOS!!! Yes! I remember that! It was one of the products in the price list of Salford Software during the early 90' So you were at NAG during the development of FNT90? I am very sorry to tell you that last year I found that my original diskettes of FTN90 were lost, so i had no material prove about the real existence of FTN90. Thanks Paul for supporting my memories!.

Agustin
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Robert



Joined: 29 Nov 2006
Posts: 444
Location: Manchester

PostPosted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 11:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

No, I was doing work for Salford Software. It was using the C++ debug information and it was 'filtered' to look like Fortran.
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mtkd



Joined: 01 Oct 2009
Posts: 1

PostPosted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 10:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi all (Hi Paul)

What is SIDE?, is that the Win32 IDE that I wrote?

Matt (Kydd)
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PaulLaidler
Site Admin


Joined: 21 Feb 2005
Posts: 7916
Location: Salford, UK

PostPosted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 1:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi Matt

No I wrote SIDE then, as I recall, you wrote the first version of Plato a little later. I had various attempts at writing a good IDE and some users found them helpful. None of these compares with the current version of Plato which I wrote from scratch starting at version 3.

There you go. I confess and here after will take all of the blame!

Paul
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Robert



Joined: 29 Nov 2006
Posts: 444
Location: Manchester

PostPosted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 2:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

So do we know if Matt's Plato ever made it out? I have just had a scoot around the source tree and cannot see it. It was raw API from what I remember.

A look in the Plato 2 enhancements file shows this:

Code:

 +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
 |                                                                            |
 | Version 2.00 (Aug 97)                                                      |
 |                                                                            |
 +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Original version with most of the features of Plato but written using
ClearWin+ instead of the Windows API.


[/code]
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rcjp



Joined: 09 Sep 2004
Posts: 1

PostPosted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 4:15 pm    Post subject: Re: Reply with quote

Robert wrote:
So do we know if Matt's Plato ever made it out? I have just had a scoot around the source tree and cannot see it. It was raw API from what I remember.
...

yep, it was raw Win32 API code and one of the first tasks Dave Vallance assigned me was to re-write Plato using ClearWin+ (with lots of help from Keng). Partly to flush out bugs in the %eb editbox control Dave Bailey was writing and partly because Dave Vallance rightly thought we should 'eat our own dogfood' as the saying goes. With quite a few internal tweaks it was used by a few of the development team for several years, including Dave Bailey.

I'm not sure Matt's Plato was ever distributed; the first ClearWin+ Plato was send out with the Student Version of the compilers and was designed with students in mind. For instance, you could set it to compile and link against e.g. the NAG libraries for a single source file without creating any project infrastructure, handy for the lots of short test files you write in taught programming classes. But it was never meant to be a full IDE and I don't think I extended it very well to cope with projects because we never used them - all the code at Salford was build with batchfiles, which I guess is why Paul re-wrote it.

Cheers,

Richard
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PaulLaidler
Site Admin


Joined: 21 Feb 2005
Posts: 7916
Location: Salford, UK

PostPosted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 5:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Readers will understand that the work that goes into writing an IDE is tiny compared to that which goes into writing compilers such as FTN77, FTN95 and SCC not to mention tools such as SDBG and SRC etc.

Perhaps someone someday will estimate how many man years has gone into producing the current FTN95 package and maybe give a comprehensive list of credits.
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tonyw



Joined: 10 Oct 2009
Posts: 1

PostPosted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 9:50 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Prime version of FTN77 wasn't actually the first version. The genesis of FTN77 came about when ICL made it clear they weren't going to do a FORTRAN77 compiler for the ICL 1900 series, and somebody to do with the provision of university computing resources (I think it was referred to as the "Computer Board", and later became part of the CCTA) set about commissioning a project to produce one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICT_1900

Dave Vallance and Dave Bailey wrote a compiler for ICL machines running under the George-3 operating system, and if I remember correctly, people were blown away a bit by the checking options, which were absent on other compilers. Certainly, later on, when it was ported to Prime machines, people using the big machines at UMRCC (University of Manchester Regional Computing Centre) would run their programs with smaller test data sets on the fairly small Primes they had there with checking turned on, prior to moving them to the bigger machines (I think they had some big CDCs).

I still remember the Primes quite well - initially the university had a couple of Prime 750s, and one or two older ones, but traded up to 9950s and 9955s while I was there. I remember one summer an acceptance test exercise for an upgrade to one of the machines - I think it was in relation to the radical idea of installing another 4 megabytes of memory!

Indeed, the compiler was written in itself. The way the "chicken and egg" paradox was resolved for the Prime was that initially it was compiled with Prime's FTN compiler I think, which was a FORTRAN IV (i.e. FORTRAN66) implementation. I think I'm right in saying the first PC compiler was bootstrapped from a cross compiler running on the Prime and producing x86 object code.

Bootstrapping produces some interesting effects - I recall that the code for gathering floating point constants from source code at one point some time ago itself had floating point constants in it, and in some circumstances would produce a single bit error. Problem is, this started to compound, so fairly quickly the precision of the constant gathering dropped off significantly, and a new version was produced that had all the constants as hex bit patterns.

As a side note, I ported FTN77 to 386-based Unix machines, running System 5.3 at the time. That again was another cross-compiler from DOS -> Unix (a bit easier, because at least the target instruction set was the same!) It saw some use, but there weren't really that many people using Unix on 386 boxes. There was some discussion of porting to multiprocessor Sequent machines, but it never came about.

I remember DB's excitement one day when he wanted to show me something - it was single-stepping through a few protected mode instructions on a 386 box. I remember being a bit underwhelmed until later when I was supporting DBOS a bit, and I realised just what it took to get that far in terms of all that had to be set up to get the virtual memory environment running. I know he had several conversations with PC manufacturers along the lines of "We're running your machine in protected mode" - "You can't be - there aren't any operating systems" ...
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nevyn



Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 3
Location: Leeds

PostPosted: Tue Oct 13, 2009 7:36 pm    Post subject: Re: Reply with quote

tonyw wrote:
As a side note, I ported FTN77 to 386-based Unix machines, running System 5.3 at the time.


This Unix port became the version of FTN77 which was later ported to Windows NT (started in 1992). The original work port was performed on the beta of Windows NT 3.1. I seem to remember reading an obiturary for John Backus which stated that he saw FORTRAN running on Windows NT and I always wondered if this was Salford's FTN77 as we were not aware of any other FORTRAN vendor working with NT at the time.

FTN90 was indeed released into the wild as a product for commercial sale and remainded that way for a while. FTN90 was the first Fortran 90 compiler on the DOS/Windows PC platform. If memory serves, Tony did a lot of the work on this product.

Cheers,
Mark
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DanRRight



Joined: 10 Mar 2008
Posts: 2813
Location: South Pole, Antarctica

PostPosted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 6:26 pm    Post subject: Re: Reply with quote

nevyn wrote:
FTN90 was the first Fortran 90 compiler on the DOS/Windows PC platform. If memory serves
... which serves to me as a user as the only legitimate excuse that at the time of its release it was the worst compiler in the history of mankind and probably always will be. Was there any big rush to show it to the public? It basically lost all great heritage of amazing FTN77. I was shocked getting it since this was my first purchase of software on my own money Sad

Good was that further work on its bugs, crashes, slow compilation, terrible I/O (which was unable even read some integer or FP value which followed by a comma) fixed the situation with quick follow up and release of FTN95. Decently saying, the last one also had a lot of bugs if the code was written in Fortran 90/95 but at least it was great for Fortran 77 and SOME essential Fortran 90 syntax. It took 7-10 more years for user-polish FTN95 to being really usable with Fortran 90/95 syntax.

I probably repeat myself 10th time, but i think all the negative sides of Salford compilers were the result of absolutely ZERO advertisement and work on its look and feel in the hands of avarage Joe. No other compiler had such high potential for advertisement being so much advanced. The other company was DEC which also almost never advertised itself. And succeeded to die being #2 in computing after IBM. No one from Salford excluding probably couple times Andrew 10 years ago participated in Fortran newsgroups advertising FTN77/95. Compare this to each day postings of Intel's Steve Lionel. Thanks to Polyherdon and recent release to the public of Personal Edition otherwise the great FTN77/95 would disappear and except some fans like we are here nobody even noticed.
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jjgermis



Joined: 21 Jun 2006
Posts: 404
Location: Nürnberg, Germany

PostPosted: Thu Oct 15, 2009 12:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I found some very intersting facts at www.qtsoftware.de

    1990: QT Software (firm in Germany) starts with the marketing of Salford compilers.

    10/1991: QT and Salford Software Ltd. are at the SYSTEMS '91 exhibition.

    04/1992: Salford Software Ltd. presents the fisrt compiler for PC's (FTN90). Furthermore, the first Clearwin Version is presented.

    03/1996: Clearwin seminar in Munich with Dr. David Bailey.

    06/1997: Salfort Software Ltd. presents the FTN95 compiler.

    2010 (besides the soccer worldcup in South Africa) Silverfrost ???

Even though we have many of our (essential) software written in Fortran and still continues to improve and expand it, many colleagues still believe (and unfortunately spread it as well) that Fortran is outdated. In my opinion the efforts by Silverfrost to come up with the Personal Edition is an important step towards positve marketing.

I would really like to once attend one of our internal meetings and need not to defend the use of Fortran as the language for our numerical programming Exclamation And at this point refering to recent develpments is definitely something which make it easier.
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nevyn



Joined: 13 Oct 2009
Posts: 3
Location: Leeds

PostPosted: Thu Oct 15, 2009 1:30 pm    Post subject: Re: Reply with quote

DanRRight wrote:
No one from Salford excluding probably couple times Andrew 10 years ago participated in Fortran newsgroups advertising FTN77/95. Compare this to each day postings of Intel's Steve Lionel.


Salford did used to monitor comp.lang.fortran on a daily basis and posted replies , you are right in that it was never a daily posting.

For those who are interested, the Personal Edition of FTN77 was release around 1999. It was available on a credit card shaped CD for a short period of time in October 1999. I think I still have one somewhere. Was that really 10 years ago !

Regards,
Mark
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