John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies

Capt Kirk said:
...though I don't remember anything special about column 6
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I'm thinking "continued from last card", but I could be wrong. I believe the last time I touched any Fortran code was 1983 when I was fixing bugs in the original version of Palasm, Vince Coli's (MMI) attempt at an assembler for his company's programmable logic devices (PALs).
 
lancefisher said:
I'm thinking "continued from last card", but I could be wrong. I believe the last time I touched any Fortran code was 1983 when I was fixing bugs in the original version of Palasm, Vince Coli's (MMI) attempt at an assembler for his company's programmable logic devices (PALs).
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Ding ding ding! We have a winner. Nothing is ever put in column 6 unless it is to indicate a continuation of the previous card. Then you can put successive numbers to indicate more than one continuation card.

Oh, are we having a wonderful old fart geek fest, or what? Seems a fitting way to remember and honor Mr. Backus.
 
Capt Kirk said:
Andrew,

Millions of lines of code...the application has been around for 20 years at an average of about 20 hard core coders developing new stuff every day during that time...it is also very mission critical processing...a lot of stuff in the core system is old and so re-writting it means making sure the new version is just a solid as stuff that has been doing its job day in and day out for a long time.

We are moving to Itanium running OpenVMS.
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You've got quite the project lined up. Given the nature of the work, I would suggest staying with an "analysis based" language, versus a "design based" language - namely, C/C++.

The downside is you have a very, very large investment in front of you: retraining existing developers may be quite expensive, since the skills don't always map very cleanly; and capturing business rules that are interspersed throughout the code. In projects such as these, the main issues I've always run across have been related to "forgotten" business rules - an obscure piece of code with a particular rule set, which doesn't make sense, yet no one in the firm can explain why it is there. A lot of very political wrangling usually ensues over what to do...

We can take this offline - I'll email you later today. Sounds like one hell of a replatform, though.

We have real time processing....we do everything via web services including accepting account update information and financial transactions 24/7/365. We can pull in the financial transactions even while the batch process crunches through the pricing and posting of today's transactions (mutual fund processing, can't actually process the trades until the price is set and that happens only once a day for most funds). We also have hot sync to a fail over copy of the database with all the industrial strength disaster recovery stuff you would expect...that gets tested once a month when we do periodic maint on the primary cluster...of course with the DEC...er...I mean HP clusters we also have fault tolllerance within the primary data center as well.
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So it's real time on the account side, but NAV (i.e. daily pricing) driven on the data side? Interesting mix. I'm on the flip side, where the account side is more or less static but the pricing side (i.e. market data) is huge.

Have you started thinking about capturing the business rules, building the vision for the next iteration of the system, and so on? Have you considered staying with FORTRAN for a period of time?

Cheers,

-Andrew
 
astanley said:
Have you started thinking about capturing the business rules, building the vision for the next iteration of the system, and so on? Have you considered staying with FORTRAN for a period of time?
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A,

RE the biz rules. The system has been N-tier since day one....really three major tiers...user interface (thin client even when we were using VT220s) is the top tier...all the biz logic is in the main middle tier and RMS files as the data tier at the bottom.

Below the biz logic tier we wrote our own I/O subsystem to access the RMS.

We are thinking about using MySQL (recently ported to the OpenVMS platform). That will let us SQL reads and writes to a SQL database and the existing RMS files where we will start to mix and match old and new. This will also let us use C# in conjunction with the FORTRAN (the use of packed data prevented the easy use of other compiled languages previously).

Anyway, that's the discussion we had today or at least my understanding of it. I drew a nice diagram that shows the MySQL accessing both the RMS and the SQL database. Hopefully I get confirmation of my understanding from the techies.

Still in the thought process stage. My understanding is that a sole person wrote and supports the MySQL for OpenVMS...not something we want to bet the farm on. We are waiting to see what HP says re: support for MySQL. Sounds promissing. What is interesting is that we have always said we could do this ever since we wrote the IO subsystem (actually it came from the precursor version of this application more than 23 years ago).

Len
 
well im kinda busy with this whole starving college kid/CFI thing. Ill ask around and see if anyone graduating this semester is looking for a programming job.
 
lancefisher said:
Too old to remember programing the format drum on the keypunch (with a punched card of course)? Or dropping the whole box of punched cards (with nary a sorter in sight) that represented your feverish attempt over the last 28 straight hours to finish the assignment on time, and being unable to decide between crying, laughing, or screaming?
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When I was in high school only the teacher's pet know-it-all computer lab aide genius could get access to the line printer terminal. The rest of us had to do our programs on punch cards. He did his many-1000 line science project on the terminal.

Guess who lost all of his work and only had a printout? :D

The teacher's suggestion was to get the rest of us busy re-entering his work on the keypunch. I shant be there.
 
Kids these days with their fancy computers. They're all folding, bending, spindling, and mutilating whenever they like. They were just never taught not to! They don't realize the danger!
-harry
 
Man,, I did some Pascal, and then took a shower.

My first real job out of college required a little diddling in COBOL. Just enough to be dangerous on a VAX. I bet some of the youngsters on this board don't even remember using cassette tapes for memory. I remember comparing one of those huge (8" - who knows) floppy disks )for a CP/M computer to a cassette and laughing -- clearly the disk would let you play tic-tac-toe faster!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
flyersfan31 said:
Man,, I did some Pascal, and then took a shower.

My first real job out of college required a little diddling in COBOL. Just enough to be dangerous on a VAX. I bet some of the youngsters on this board don't even remember using cassette tapes for memory. I remember comparing one of those huge (8" - who knows) floppy disks )for a CP/M computer to a cassette and laughing -- clearly the disk would let you play tic-tac-toe faster!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Well, I'm not a kid. And I remember when cassette tape on a computer was new technology. :D Keypunches and teletypes in 1969.
 
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