Data formats was Re: Rescue of data from Pioneer 10 & 11tapesatJPL needed.Vintagecomputers slated for demolition.

[Randy McLaughlin]

From: "Paul Koning" <pkoning at equallogic.com>
Sent: Friday, June 10, 2005 12:50 PM


>>>>>> "Antonio" == Antonio Carlini <a.carlini at ntlworld.com> writes:
>
> Antonio> Paul Koning wrote:
> >> longer in current use, like Jovial or Algol or Bliss.  Then
>
> Antonio> In which sense is BLISS not in current use? I know most
> Antonio> _new_ stuff that OpenVMS Engineering do is now in C, but
> Antonio> there must be plenty of maintenance etc. happening in BLISS!
>
> Antonio> I'm sure I still have an Algol compilr for OpenVMS
> Antonio> somewhere. While Algol has probably fallen out of use, I
> Antonio> expect that there are still plenty of people who would crawl
> Antonio> out of the woodwork to help!
>
> Antonio> I'll leave Jovial for someone else to defend :-)
>
> Sure.  None of those are completely gone.  All of them are languages
> for which there are few platforms, and (at least for Bliss and Algol)
> severe portability issues.  In Bliss that's by design; in Algol it is
> because there are lots of incompabile ways to add necessary features
> -- like I/O -- to an otherwise very portable but impractical
> language.
>
> Then there are "high level" languages like Sympl, or worse yet, Cybil,
> which work on any machine you might like so long as it's a CDC Cyber
> 70/170 family member...
>
>      paul

As for any problems with particular language dialects it has already been 
pointed out:

There is the option of supporting the original hardware via emulation 
(faster than the original hardware to boot).

The original software would have been likely written in Fortran which like 
any other language written on a particular environment will take some 
editing to get going but very doable.


Randy
www.s100-manuals.com