Fortran II source in Paul Pierce’s collection

Last Friday, Bob Abeles posted a comment here saying:

The IBSYS tapes on Paul Pierce’s site contain the source for FAP, FORTRAN II, FMS (version that ran under IBSYS), plus lots of other goodies. I wrote a program several years ago that extracts the sources. I’ll try to dig it up this weekend and will post a followup next week.

I had looked through Paul’s Yale SHARE tapes, but had not thought of looking at the IBSYS tapes. Sure enough, pr130-3.bcd, when converted with Paul’s bcd2txt, contains source code for something that calls itself “32K 709/7090 FORTRAN” and that consists of sections one through six with comments corresponding exactly to Backus’s descriptions (see for example Backus et al., “The FORTRAN Automatic Coding System”, Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference, Los Angeles, California, February 1957 and John Backus, “The history of FORTRAN I, II, and III”, Proceedings of the First ACM SIGPLAN Conference on History of Programming Languages, Los Angeles, California, 1978″).

This is very exciting. Given the progress running IBSYS Fortran IV and Cobol on Rob Storey’s 7094 emulator, we may be able to run Fortran II!

Update: 7 Jan 2015: Updated URL for Rob’s progress posting.