Re: DEC Fortran
Back in the early 80's, I used DEC FORTRAN on a VAX-11/780 developing an early Geographic Information System (as it is called these days). I remember one program (interpolating spot heights on a grid from contour lines, perhaps) which did a lot of looping over arrays. There was a DEC supplied program that drew a text based representation on a VT100 of pages being swapped (paged?) in and out of memory (we originally had a huge 512kB, later expanded to 3/4 of a MB). You could see when you had your array indices the wrong way round, pages were rapidly swapped in and out all over the place, rather than a neat little chunk with pages being added at the end and lost at the beginning.
That computer (about 1MIPS) and memory were enough to run an interactive line following digitising program as well as several developers simultaneously editing and compiling.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
