History of Salford and Silverfrost

Hi all (Hi Paul)

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

Matt (Kydd)

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

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:

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

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

[/code]

Quoted from Robert 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

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.

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' ...

Quoted from tonyw 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

Quoted from nevyn 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 😦

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.

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 ([color=red:3697a3e2ae]and unfortunately spread it as well[/color:3697a3e2ae]) 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 :!: And at this point refering to recent develpments is definitely something which make it easier.

Quoted from DanRRight 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

jjgermis

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 the world of finite element analysis, consider these well known solvers, Nastran, Abaqus, Lusas, Ansys, Algor, CalculiX...... they all have solvers written in Fortran. Perhaps this might help to change your work colleagues attitude!

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

I don't think Silverfrost can be blamed or congratulated for the soccer world cup being in South Africa.

Quoted from silverfrost

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

I don't think Silverfrost can be blamed or congratulated for the soccer world cup being in South Africa.

If we start congratulation & blame game...

Oh yea, Silverfrost/Salford for sure can be congratulated and blamed for many things....Just few of them: Salford can be congratulated for the first compiler which opened 32bit address space for PC Fortran users (specifically shocking was virtual common), while Silverfrost can be blamed for potentially being the last in 64 bits...

Silverfrost can be congratulated for being first in debugging capabilities and blamed for being last in code execution speed in Polyhedron examples (excluding may be couple cases where it is first)

Silverfrost can be one more time congratulated for superb debugging capabilities (it offers such super-hack like undefined variable check for example for decades) but again blamed for the most primitive Windows 3.1-ish look and sloppy gray windows of its debugger. People touching it will never believe this is a king of debugging and not a rat.

Silverfrost can be congratulated for hell a lot of such hacks but blamed for not supporting those damn primitive VAX extensions like <n>X for n spaces in format statement or not allowing X (for one space) requiring writing 1X instead.

Silverfrost can be congratulated for amazing compilation speed and blamed for the same poor execution code efficiency

Silverfrost can be congratulated for rich graphics capabilities and blamed for not being able to handle Matlab or Mathematica graphics

Silverfrost can be congratulated for supporting OpenGL, but blamed that the examples they provide don't have a smallest artistic touch. This is great selling point completely not addressed by Silverfrost

Silverfrost can be congratulated for multithreading cabilities and blamed for not supporting OpenMP or parallel linear algebra libraries of www.equation.com (and when asked to help by its developer, Silverfrost became the only Fortran developer which did not care)

Silverfrost can be congratulated for Clearwin in Windows and blamed for weak pushing it as a standard for Windows/Unix Fortran users where hyperactive in advertisement Winteracter eats its breakfast, lunch and dinner and due to that continuing growing further (The amazing example that Solverfrost does not care how it looks in the eyes of Fortran users is that Polyhedron for more then a decade writes here http://polyhedron.com/clearwin 'Salford Clearwin+ is very concise, 'Hello World' requires only 4 lines of Fortran code...' while to be exact actually 'Hello World' requires just the same 1 line of Fortran text and even the same amount symbols. Compare i=winio@('Hello World') end

with

write(*,*)'Hello World'
end

. I can not imagine this would be written about my own software)

Silverfrost can be congratulated for the ability to directly write C code in the Fortran source and blamed for not advertising it

Silverfrost can be congratulated for giving users ability to write also HTML code in the Fortran source and blamed that nobody even knows that

Silverfrost can be congratulated for being most feature-rich Fortran compiler and blamed for having most boring look and wrap because probably decided that advertisement is not important. I remember DB had video presentation for FTN95. Repeat this inviting similar guy like one from www.slapchop.com and sell FTN95 like hot cakes on your own stadium after buying back the football team from Abramovich. (Btw these folks from Slapchop are so damn crooky, they've easily made me for 63 bucks instead of 19.95!)

Silverfrost can be congratulated for making free Fortran for personal use which beats absolutely each and every other compilers including C in downloads per week and blamed for not being aggressive in advertisement and not smashing instead other Fortran companies with stellar sal

Silverfrost can be congratulated for giving users ability to write also HTML code in the Fortran source and blamed that nobody even knows that

Silverfrost can be congratulated for the .NET and blamed for 99.999999% of FTN95 users have no clue what the hell it can be used for...

The comments from Robert are indeed interesting and to I can assent myself to almost all of them. I certainly am one of the nobodies in the above two statements.

I assume that many of the blames can be traced back to the available capacities at Silverfrost. This still is one of the lacking information in the history. Over the years there must have been some increase in the number of employees :?:

One positive development of making FTN95 free for personal use is that it is included in the Fortran course presented at the University of Bayreuth (Germany) - https://srv.rz.uni-bayreuth.de/lehre/fortran90/vorlesung/

Quoted from JohnHorspool jjgermis

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 the world of finite element analysis, consider these well known solvers, Nastran, Abaqus, Lusas, Ansys, Algor, CalculiX...... they all have solvers written in Fortran. Perhaps this might help to change your work colleagues attitude!

...or in the modern world of microprocessor benchmarks like FP Component of SPEC CPU2006 which 50:50 consists of Fortran and C. No, do not worry, scientific and engineering applications will be mostly written in Fortran and there is already no tendency for Fortran to retreat further like it was one-two decades ago driven by hysteria of networking, computer graphics, server, Internet commerce, web development and universities computer science departments people.

Seems things go now exactly opposite. Fortran standards get it more modern. Fortran compiler developers add useful extensions like with all other languages almost eliminating your need for C (and guess which Fortran compiler is first here ). Fortran newsgroups are one of the most active on the net beating all others besides C. Silverfrost is literally surging beating downloads per week records -- even i did not believe my eyes several months ago seeing that FTN95 was beating all other C, C#, VB, VBnet, Pascals and long bunch of others in downloads on CNet. And it still is in first 3-5.

Of course there exist good reasons for that. For me major in using Fortran is its ultimate simplicity with the syntax almost as simple and natural as in calculator, the minimal source code size and hence highest development speed and hassle-free manageability,its unparalleled debugging capabilities and guaranteed high execution speed which you can fine-tune to the absolute limit of you like. All that is most important specifically for large codes.

And even more specifically for Salford/Sliverfrost, though this sounds a bit as an extreme, i do not believe to any large code results if the code was written not in this compiler. I can beat i will find so many bugs in other codes that can claim that almost for sure all previous published results of these codes are wrong 😃. Lahey and probably recently Intel only approach Silverfrost in this matter. Last year i was adapting to FTN95 someone's large code developed during last 25 years which according to its authors was 'working well' with different Unix and some PC compilers. The code has large users base and produces many megabytes of data per run. I gave up with it finding thousands of bugs and spurious shocking 10^4 difference on some specific data. It was literally impossible to fix the bugs without authors sitting near you. And this was mostly Fortran 77. I wouldn't even touch any large C code, only fire can fix its hidden bugs. So if somebody does not like this my extreme claim, they just calming themselves that the last bug in the code anyway is never found which might be true but here nothing we can do, higher then FTN95 there is no authority.

Until now there much more (and valuable) information that goes beyond the history. However, should one call the FTN compiler a Salford or a Silverfrost compiler? What else does Silverfrost do besides the FTN compiler. When I go to www.silverfrost.com I find information on FTN95 and Solar Kingdom. Yes, the 'About us' tab gives a little bit information which then set a link to Salford. Does this means that Salford 'oder' the FTN95 compiler from Silverfrost?

I would take me half an hour to dig out an acurate history and I don't see how it will help you.

Paul, a few weeks ago this was your reaction on this topic. In the meanwhile I have discussed many of the ideas in the forum with colleagues - very interesting!

I am amazed by the number of views. What is your opinion on this - do you still believe it is not helpful?

Our history teacher tought us: If you would like to plan for the future, you should know the past.

I am happy to be proved wrong.

This entry might be a bit besides the point. Nevertheless, this is some example (or rather format) I would like to find when I look for the history of Salford/Silverfrost: http://www.silverfrost.com/21/ftn95/scientific_graphics_for_dotnet_a_case_study.aspx

By the way: How do I find my form www.silverfrost.com to this link.