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From: BVAUGHAN@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Barbara Vaughan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: (Yes my) SW Make it to the year 2000?
Message-ID: <8824@pucc.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 3 Jul 89 15:21:13 GMT
References: <754@mitisft.Convergent.COM> <1545@hjuxa.UUCP>
Reply-To: BVAUGHAN@pucc.Princeton.EDU
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 44
Disclaimer: Author bears full responsibility for contents of this article

In article <1545@hjuxa.UUCP>, mal@hjuxa.UUCP (LEACH) writes:

>From article <754@mitisft.Convergent.COM>, by dold@mitisft.Convergent.COM (Clarence Dold):
>>
>> I think some software will easily survive another 10 years.
>> Ha! You say.  Where is CP/M now?
>> I only know that I was rather surprised to find a former customer of mine
>> calling for conversion assistance on a program that he has been using,
>> unmodified, since 1979.                                               hrough
I recently learned that a company that I formerly worked for had hired
a consultant to port a program from an IBM CMS system to
an IBM PC.  I wrote this program in 1969 for a second-generation GE
computer. In 1971, I modified it to make it interactive for a GE time-
sharing system (Tymeshare?).  A few years later, someone ported it to
an IBM CMS system.  The only major modification was the one made in 1971
to make the program interactive.  I only wish I had known how much they
were prepared to pay to port it to an IBM PC; I would have certainly
bid for the job!  When I heard what the consultant was charging, I
assumed he was comletely rewriting it, but my informant (who still worked
for my former employer) assured me he was porting it essentially
unmodified. Since it was written in Fortran it would be a fairly easy
port. I've done it many times.  (I can remember when people said Fortran
wouldn't last ten years.)
  On a related note, about five years ago I was involved in a project to
produce the second edition of a book that had an enormous influence on
the field of demography, "Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Popu-
lations" by Ansley Coale and Paul Demeny. Many of the tables in the first
edition had been produced by a Fortran program written by Paul Demeny
when he was a young research assistant in the early 1960's. Paul Demeny
has since become a famous demographer himself.  Anyway, Ansley Coale
dug out an old box of computer cards containing Paul Demeny's original
Fortran program.  I felt as though I were handling history.  I had to
make extensive changes in the program to reflect recent changes in the
knowledge of mortality structures and improvements in life expectancy,
but I decided that out of respect for my predecessor I would retain as
much of his code as possible.  After the second edition of the book
was published, I wrote an interactive DOS version of the mortality
analysis program, which is now used by demographers around the world.
One subroutine in this program consists almost entirely of Paul
Demeny's original Fortran code. (I left his code all upper-case so
it could be identified.)  This code is now over 25 years old and going
strong.

Barbara Vaughan