{"id":6528,"date":"2019-04-17T05:25:35","date_gmt":"2019-04-17T04:25:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=6528"},"modified":"2019-04-17T05:25:35","modified_gmt":"2019-04-17T04:25:35","slug":"fortran-compiler-for-sinclair-zx-spectrum-rediscovered-after-40-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=6528","title":{"rendered":"Fortran Compiler for Sinclair ZX Spectrum rediscovered after 40 years"},"content":{"rendered":"

It started with a tweet<\/strong><\/p>\n

While basking in some geek nostalgia on twitter, I discovered that my first ever microcomputer, the Sinclair Spectrum<\/a>, once had a Fortran compiler<\/a><\/p>\n

\"mira\"<\/a><\/p>\n

However, that compiler was seemingly lost to history and was declared Missing in Action on World of Spectrum<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"mira2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A few of us on Twitter enjoyed reading the 1987 review of this Fortran Compiler<\/a>\u00a0but since no one had ever uploaded an image of it to the internet, it seemed that we’d never get the chance to play with it ourselves.<\/p>\n

I never thought it would come to this<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the benefits of 5000+ followers on Twitter<\/a> is that there’s\u00a0usually someone who knows something interesting about whatever you happen to tweet about and in this instance, that somebody was my fellow Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute<\/a>,\u00a0Barry Rowlingson<\/a>.\u00a0 Barry was fairly sure that he’d recently packed a copy of the Mira Fortran Compiler away in his loft and was blissfully unaware of the fact that he was sitting on a missing piece of microcomputing history!\"mira3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

He was right! He did have it in the attic…and members of the community<\/a> considered it valuable.<\/p>\n

\"mira_box\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As Barry mentioned in his tweet, converting a 40 year old cassette to an archivable .tzx format is a process that could result in permanent failure.\u00a0 The attempt on side 1 of the cassette didn’t work but fortunately, side 2 is where the action was!<\/p>\n

\"makeTzx\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It turns out that everything worked perfectly.\u00a0 On loading it into a Spectrum emulator, Barry could enter and compile Fortran on this platform for the first time in decades! Here is the source code for a program that computes prime numbers<\/p>\n

\"prime_source\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here it is running<\/p>\n

\"running_primes\"<\/a><\/p>\n

and here we have Barry giving the sales pitch on the advanced functionality of this compiler :)<\/p>\n

\"high_res\"<\/a><\/p>\n

How to get the compiler<\/strong><\/p>\n

Barry has made the compiler, and scans of the documentation, available at\u00a0https:\/\/gitlab.com\/b-rowlingson\/mirafortran<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It started with a tweet While basking in some geek nostalgia on twitter, I discovered that my first ever microcomputer, the Sinclair Spectrum, once had a Fortran compiler However, that compiler was seemingly lost to history and was declared Missing in Action on World of Spectrum. A few of us on Twitter enjoyed reading the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[34,7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fortran","category-programming","category-retro-computers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-1Hi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6528"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6565,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6528\/revisions\/6565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}