Calculator test

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello,

(12-08-2024 08:13 PM)dm319 Wrote:  Was there software around at the time to do complex calculations on a PC or Unix? What do people use these days (and please don't say wolfram alpha)?

I am talking only about the early 1980ies now: I did my first programming course at university in FORTRAN (which natively features the COMPLEX data type) using punch cards. There were several mainframe computers and there were many terminals with "time share" access, but not for ordinary students. Then there was the first generation of personal computers like Commodore PET, Apple II, Atari 800 or the HP-85. They all came with BASIC interpreters. To my knowledge, none of these BASIC versions came with complex data natively (not even the HP-85 - I just looked it up), but it is fairly straightforward to program your own complex routines if you need them.
Later in the 1980ies I worked on unix workstations, mostly programming in C. There is no native support for complex numbers in C either. When I needed complex numbers, I used the routines from the book "Numerical Recipes in C".
In one of my student jobs around the mid 1980ies there was an early IBM PC with a FORTRAN compiler (that fitted on a single low-density floppy disk!) that also had the complex data type.

Regards
Max