"25 Years of MN FORTRAN at the University of Minnesota - 1963 to 1988"

Speaker: Lawrence A. Liddiard,

Continuing on some historical themes from last year, we are offering another program highlighting Minnesota's significant contributions to computing technology.  Last year's programs included a presentation on Minnesota computing in the 40's and 50's and the connections to the origin of object oriented programming in the early 60's.  This month's program is an exploration of the early years of the FORTRAN programming language at the University of Minnesota. The MNF compiler was used at 85 sites in the US and other countries, besides the University of Minnesota.  At its peak, M77 was executed over 150,000 times per month.  The accuracy and speed of the MNF basic routines ATAN, SIN/COS made them used in all CDC production products for CYBER systems.  Several individuals working on these FORTRANs later worked at CRAY on FORTRAN. Chronology: 1964-1966 U of M FORTRAN - a Rewrite of CDC FORTRAN 60  1967-1975 MNF FORTRAN - ANS FORTRAN 66 (Table design, Error Messages, Expressions, Optimization) 1970-1974 MNF LIBRARY - (I/O routines, REAL functions) 1977-1984 M77 FORTRAN COMPILER - ANS FORTRAN 78 (Extension of MNF) XOTHER arithmetic 1977-1984 M77 LIBRARY - (Character I/O routines, COMPLEX and DOUBLE PRECISION functions TOPICS to be touched:  Accuracy - Constants, Complex Division, Arithmetic Functions, Interval Arithmetic  Compiler Techniques - Table management, Searching, Boolean product to find errors  Code Generation - Speed, algorithms, optimizations  Debugging - Error finding & messages, TRACE statements, Post Mortem Dumps

About the Speaker:

University of Minnesota: Research Assistant  Sep ‘60 to Sep ’62; Research Fellow  Sep ‘62 to Jul ‘65; Research Associate  Jul ‘65 to Jul ‘69; Tenured Research Associate  Jul ‘69 to Jan ‘98.

Besides the Army in 1954-1956 & Boeing Aircraft in 1959-1960, Lawrence Liddiard has been involved with computers - the great introvert invention - at the University from 1958 to Dec 2000.   He was involved in the selections of all central computing systems after the UNIVAC 1103.  These were the CDC 1604 in 1962, the CDC 6600 in 1966, the CYBER 74 in 1974, the CYBER 172 in 1978, the VAX 11/780 in 1981, the CRAY 1 in 1981, and the CYBER 845 and 825 in 1983.  Worked on big iron - CDC, VAX and CRAY computers doing FORTRAN compilers, functions, PASCAL programming, simulations and statistical analyses.  Was acting director of U Computer Services in 1984 and of U Networking Services 1991-1993 - Worked in other operational, system and administrative positions and wrote articles for newsletters.

• U of M FORTRAN Rewrite of CDC FORTRAN 60 with Richard Hendrickson and Robert Goodwin.  (Machine Language)   1964 - 66.
• REAL FUNCTIONS ALOG, ATAN, ATAN2, EXP, SIN/COS, SQRT, (ATAN, SIN/COS used in CDC FORTRAN and Pascal Systems) Algorithms by K. Frankowski,  1970.
• MNF FORTRAN ANS FORTRAN 66 with E.J. Mundstock, Michael Frisch & Clive Schofield (Table design, Error Messages, Expressions, Optimization)  1967-1975.
• MNF LIBRARY (I/O routines, REAL functions)  1970-1974.
• M77 FORTRAN COMPILER ANS FORTRAN 78 (Extension of MNF), by E.J. Mundstock with T. Gerber  and J. Eberhart,  Maintenance and Error corrections to meet Validation Suite, XOTHER arithmetic, NAMELIST and error message extensions. 1977-1984.
• M77 LIBRARY (Character extensions to I/O routines, COMPLEX and DOUBLE PRECISION arithmetic functions, NAMELIST routines.) 1977-1984.