1983

FORTRAN 77

A major review of the situation was held with the government people assigned to the project and a “waiver” to the use of Ada was granted. Instead of Ada, the system would be coded in FORTRAN 77.  What, that’s crazy I thought at the time, I was looking forward to writing some Ada code, but Fortran?  

Historical note: FORTRAN stood for “Formula Translation” and was generally spelled with all caps largely because early IBM computers did not support lower case letters.  It wasn’t until 1990 with the introduction of Fortran 90 that it was officially spelled with only an initial capital.

FORTRAN was the first computer language I had programmed in back in 1970 and was a very limited language compared to “modern” programming languages like Ada, Pascal, and C.  This deficiency was realized back in 1977 and new statements were added to FORTRAN 77 like the “DO” loop statement.  Even still, it was still Fortran and wasn’t very suitable for what we were doing.  But we continued on, converting our ADA pseudo code into FORTRAN 77 programs.

With my code written came the code reviews.  Much like the pseudo code design reviews, two or three other programs would sit in a conference room and go line by line through your FORTRAN 77 code.  Peer code reviews was the latest thing in software development, supposed to catch many bugs in the code before it was even run.  In reality it only caught the most obvious mistakes for few other programmers cared, or much less understood someone else’s code.  But Harris didn’t mind, as it meant they would make more money.

With my code review complete, I finally got to sit down in front of the amazing Ramtek graphic displays and test it.  In a few days I had it mostly working, it was very cool to see my code display weather data on the screen overlayed over maps and satellite data for any place in the world.  It wasn’t real time as we were only worked with a snapshot of the weather and satellite data.  I never got to see the overlay of the military airplane flight paths as that was restricted to those with clearance.

Harris would later go on to finish and offer an Ada compiler and associated development tools for their computer systems since they had a significant business in the defense industry.

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