Compiling Cobol and Fortran in CP/M on the Altair 8800 (Altair-Duino)

[@MrWaalkman]

Fortran was my first programming language. Cobol came few years later. Algol was in the mix, as was BASIC of course. Nice to see that it's still out there.

[@edgeeffect]

Kids the year before me at college (my year, we used a PDP-11) used to compile COBOL on CP/M on floppy disks. The speed some of them could swap between disk 1 and disk 2 in A: whilst keeping their source and object code on B: was quite astonishing. The first hard drives started arriving at college 2 years later, around 1986 once our CP/M machines were starting to "retire".

[@retroelectrons2]

Very cooi.

[@mnoxman]

You could try Turnkey MVS 5U3 on Hercules. That way you learn JCL too.

[@elinars5638]

Somebody needs to make CP/M v.2024

[@peterward305]

cls will clear the screen

[@classicnosh]

I'm not sure CLS worked as intended. To interact with the Alair, we had to use a teletype printer or a dumb terminal. These terminals lacked advanced display options, so we had to get creative. For example, an old chess game would use a series of carriage returns to refresh the screen. When a piece moved, the entire board would scroll up, placing the pieces in their correct positions. It was slow, but we made it work.