19 Mar
2018
19 Mar
'18
11:32 p.m.
In roughly 1977 I was trying to use the 'fc' Fortran compiler
that came with Version 6 Unix at UC Santa Barbara. I needed to
do some binary I/O to read digitized speech data. That compiler
was very limited so I did what anybody would do back then - I called
Dennis Ritchie, who had written 'fc', to ask him what to do. I remember
he was surprisingly gracious but I don't remember what he said to do.
Version 7 Unix came to UCSB soon afterwards and I started using it.
It was easy to call C routines from it, which I did for a number of
low level purposes. However, I soon discovered some 'f77' bugs.
Fortunately Stu Feldman was visiting UCSB so I was able to demonstrate
the bugs to him personally. Again, I don't remember what came of this
but the Unix world was so small back then that it was common to be able
to communicate with many of the key developers.
Jon Forrest