http://www.codecomments.com/archive271-2005-2-400743.html

Tom, Thanks for the kind words and the memory prompts.

For the record, here are some Fortran events from the 1960s as an old
man remembers them - any corrections would be appreciated.

January 1962, La Jolla, CA. I began working at Daystrom, a small
process-control computer-company. My title: Some variation on Senior
Software Guru. My responsibility: To accept delivery of, plus
maintain and enhance, software tools for the Daystrom 636, a 15-bit
word, process control system (no hardware floating point). One of the
tools was a Fortran language system delivered by Digitek for the price
of $25,000; the language system ran in 4K 15-bit words.

Digitek, Culver City, CA, was founded by three equal partners: James
R. Dunlap, Don Ryan, and Don Peckham; with Jim being most equal; the
three had met while working at Hughes Aircraft Co., Culver City. Jim
and Digitek were mentioned in early editions of The Art of Computer
Programming, Knuth. Don Peckham was bought out; Don Ryan went on with
Dave McFarland, also from Digitek, to found Ryan-McFarland.

Jim invented (at least refined and proved economically viable) a
programming paradigm for compiler writing: POPs, Program Operations.
Jim designed a computer on paper, an instruction was a POP, e.g., RCA,
Require Character and Advance; it was "easy" to write compilers on
this paper computer that would eventually be emulated on the
customer's hardware. The principal features of this paper computer:
LIFO variable length tables, recursion, a stack, translation to, and
manipulation of Polish encryption of the program being compiled,
character-scanning and code-generation POPs.

I pursued employment with Digitek for more than a year and was
eventually hired in August 1964, the tenth or eleventh employee; I was
generously allowed to purchase one percent of Digitek for $30, each
partner selling me ten shares. During my two years plus one week of
employment, Digitek grew to more than 40(?) employees, moved to
quarters on Century Blvd near LAX, and went public; after a ten-to-one
stock split I sold shares for between $6 and $16 - regretfully not
all of them!

Digitek's first compiler customer was Scientific Data Systems, aka
SDS, a hardware company created by Max Palevsky and later acquired by
Xerox for close to $1 billion in 1969. Palevsky was also involved in
the startup of and served as a director of Intel from 1968 until his
retirement, April 2000 and is a former governing board member of the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. SDS was
dedicated to the scientific marketplace (as was Control Data Systems),
a niche that IBM was reputed to ignore. (I never understood this
claim; clearly there was something to it because they both thrived for
a while. In my opinion, IBM led the way in Fortran for decades. In my
opinion the IBM user group, SHARE (Society to Help Relieve Redundant
Effort), lead in Fortran feature definition for decades.)

Another Digitek language-systems project: Develop a proprietary for
lease a Fortran IV compiler for the IBM 7090 series. Although 2-page
color ads appeared in Datamation, the product was never brought to
market.

While I was at Digitek, IBM had Digitek and CSC compete for a contract
to implement two Fortran language systems for the IBM 360. The firms
were paid to work on a front end, Bob Trainer was the Digitek project
leader; Digitek won and received the code generation contract. Jim
designed a DO loop optimization that I coded; the language systems were
known as Fortran D and Fortran G.

Gordon Sande, "They also had a contract to produce a PL/I for a
customer who pulled the plug for the usual reasons (if I believe the
stories). But their advertising agency was not told so that the back
cover of CACM had an ad saying, 'Ask the man who owns one' as puffery
for the PL/I when it had already been canceled for excessive under
delivery. Oops!" The PL/I compiler contract was canceled for reasons
unknown to me as I had left; I think the customer was SDS. As for the
ad, maybe its appearance was due to timing and communication problems
as opposed to intent to mislead.

I recall earlier Digitek ads that appeared in Datamation - I found
those ads compelling /direct/factual.