Univac 90/30 FORTRAN?

[undefined Hancock-4]

According to the product brochures, the UNIVAC 90/30 computer supported Fortran when equipped with the floating point microcode feature. (The 90/30 was roughly equivalent to an IBM S/370-135, a byte oriented machine). So, my guess is that the 90/30 could run Fortran jobs reasonably well. Would anyone have any experience or know of any 90/30 sites that used Fortran? If so, how did it work out for them?

I guess it's possible someone could've bought a Univac 90/30 to do sci/eng work since it did support floating point and Fortran. I have no idea if that would've been a cost effective choice--I don't know how the 90/30 ranked compared to other computers out there at the time that could've done Fortran reasonably well. As a business machine, the 90/30 had tolerable I/O capability. Some Fortran applications did need some better I/O, like decent tape, disk, cards, and printer. As best as I could tell, you'd get far faster I/O on a 90/30 than say an 1130, (but maybe paying for it).

Any observations?

As an aside, I suspect the 90/30 was cheaper than its equivalent IBM counterpart (roughly 370-135).

(I don't know anything about Univac's other "Series 90" product line. There's some stuff on bitsavers.)

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by undefined Hancock-4
According to the product brochures, the UNIVAC 90/30 computer
supported Fortran when equipped with the floating point microcode
feature. (The 90/30 was roughly equivalent to an IBM S/370-135,
a byte oriented machine). So, my guess is that the 90/30 could
run Fortran jobs reasonably well. Would anyone have any experience
or know of any 90/30 sites that used Fortran? If so, how did it
work out for them?

I didn't do any production Fortran on a 90/30, but I did
port Adventure and Dungeon from PDP-11 Fortran to run on it.
(Dungeon was 14,000 lines of Fortran, full of DECisms, so
it was quite a challenge, even before getting it to talk to
Univac's block-mode polled terminals.)

Trivia: Univac's 8080 cross-assembler (designed for writing
programs that were downloaded to their UTS 400 smart terminals)
was written in Fortran (probably so it could be used on their
1100 series as well). It ran like molasses through a pinhole;
a friend wrote a cross-assembler in COBOL that ran rings around it.

Post by undefined Hancock-4
As an aside, I suspect the 90/30 was cheaper than its
equivalent IBM counterpart (roughly 370-135).

Cheap enough, anyway - Univac sold a lot of them, plus the
follow-on System 80 machines.

Post by undefined Hancock-4
(I don't know anything about Univac's other "Series 90"
product line. There's some stuff on bitsavers.)

And there'll soon be a lot more. I've almost finished scanning
the wall of OS/3 documentation that I was issued when I was a
Univac SA, and when I'm done I'll upload everything to Bitsavers.