Iitran Language

Back in 1967 or so, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago owned an IBM System 360/40 running DOS/360. The FORTRAN available on this machine was USA BASIC FORTRAN, with extremely limited syntax and even more cryptic diagnostics.

As I understand it, Bob Dewar, Ron Hochsprung and others in the Computer Center decided to make a more friendly language than the miserable IBM FORTRAN for students to learn to program with. Thus was born IITRAN - a sort of relaxed FORTRAN, interpreted, not compiled, with simplified I/O facilities and a very tolerant syntax.

If anyone remembers DOS/360 on a 131K machine, you'll recall that two foreground partitions were allowed. If I recall correctly, one was used for RJE (Remote Job Entry) and printing and the other, was used for IITRAN. There were Teletype ASR 33's scattered throughout the campus and one could enter and run IITRAN programs from them, as well as take the more conventional route of punching a program into cards and submitting it via RJE for execution.

I don't know how long IITRAN was in use at IIT, but given the limited resources of the 360/40, it did serve quite a number of students and was very easy to learn.

-- Chuck Guzis (who thanks Bob Dewar for convincing him to transfer to Purdue, where they had much better resources)

I punched a lot of programs for beginning programmers during a free period in my senior year at Highland High School. One of the quirks of the job submission process is that input flow control was achieved by the system's echo of X-OFF characters we typed at the end of every line. The prescribed end of line sequence was CR, LF, X-OFF, RUBOUT, RUBOUT. I learned to type this as fast as the Model 33 teletype could punch it onto paper tape. Unfortunately, the echo delay turned out to be unbounded and the very occasional very long display would cause lost characters and another day lost debugging a program. We developed the practice of holding repeat and punching a second or so of RUBOUTs to make sure the X-OFF had time to echo before the characters of the next line were read and lost. -- WardCunningham

See TheEnd

My brother Dave was probably one of those beginning programmers. :) -- KenDibble

Interesting. I ran IITRAN from a teletype at my high school in Montreal in the early 1970's, connected over the TTY line to IIT's IBM 360. I recall the X-OFF, RUBOUT characters that had to be put on the paper tape. I arrived here not sure if there would be anyone left knowing about IITRAN. -- John Fossey CategoryProgrammingLanguage