[Info-vax] fortran compiler roadmap?

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote 2013-04-17 22:08:
> In article <8043dfce-3712-4b9c-9614-6a1fd7a89f8b at googlegroups.com>, Ken
> Fairfield <ken.fairfield at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> There are a handful of us who are in both groups pretty
>> regularly.  Phillip Helbig and Glen Herrmannsfeldt come to
>> mind.  Steve Lionel was a Digital/VMS employee until Digital
>> (or was it Compaq?) "sold" the Fortran compiler team to
>> Compaq, and thence Intel (I'm sure I have that wrong, but
>> it approximates what happened).
>
> In 1999, I was in Boston for a conference.  Since it wasn't far away, I
> made a pilgrimage to Nashua.  Steve was kind enough to show me around.
> I brought back a Compaq mug as one of my souvenirs (admittedly the least
> prized one), so it was definitely Compaq then.  (I also got to meet Hoff
> and Andy Goldstein.  Fred Kleinsorge wasn't in that day.)  It was
> towards the end of 2000 that HP bought Compaq, and the alphacide was
> shortly before that (honi soit qui mal y pense).
>
> By a bizarre coincidence, the woman who organized the conference in
> Boston was involved with a charity for whom Steve was the webmaster.
> Also, there happened to be a store nearby---they seemed to deal mostly
> in video games and probably didn't even know what VMS is---which was one
> of the few places in the world which had |d|i|g|i|t|a|l| InfoServers in
> stock.  A fellow VMS enthusiast had asked me to bring him back a couple.
> I agreed, not realizing how huge the boxes were (InfoServer, pedestal,
> packaging etc).  Somehow, I managed to bring them back to England, which
> is one of the places I was working at the time, on the plane without
> having to pay for extra baggage.  People who thought I was strange had
> their impression confirmed when, at the conference, I carried them up to
> my hotel room one by one.
>
> Steve was always a big help with regard to VMS Fortran and an all-around
> nice guy.
>

I had some personal contact with Lionel in a prorting project where
I ported an application in Fortran (wrapped in some DCL as user
interface) to a PC environment using a Visual Basic screen as
user interface and the Fortran code built as an DLL (called from
VB) using Visual Fortran. VF come quite close after Intel bought
the Fortran group.

The port was easy since Visual Fortran had very good compatibilty
with DEC/CPQ Fortran. If I'm not wrong, Lionel was the manager
for the Visual Fortran product (?).

Jan-Erik.