Installing the Compaq Visual Fortran 6.0 compiler using Take Command

[Umesh]

Hi, Folks:

After Windows 7, it became infeasible to install the CVF Fortran compiler - some parts of the installation are 16-bit. I am hoping Take Command will enable this installation to proceed smoothly.

Any advice on this matter will greatly be appreciated.

Sincerely,

Umesh Mathur

P.S.: FORTRAN, you ask? I say yes, because (a) I am old, (b) there is just too much first-rate mathematical and scientific source code out there which is written in Fortran and would take forever to convert to a more "modern" language. Besides, Fortran 95 is good enough for 99% of what most people need, IMHO.

 

[Joe Caverly]

P.S.: FORTRAN, you ask? I say yes, because (a) I am old, (b) there is just too much first-rate mathematical and scientific source code out there which is written in Fortran and would take forever to convert to a more "modern" language. Besides, Fortran 95 is good enough for 99% of what most people need, IMHO.

Hi,
Forget running Visual Fortran 6.0 in Take Command. I have tried running Microsoft COBOL 4.5, dBASE IV 2.0, Micro Focus COBOL, etc., in a modern OS. Far too many problems, but it is not the fault of Take Command. The fault is with Microsoft, and not wanting to be backwards compatible.

For example, I am unable to run Micro Focus Visual Object COBOL on my Microsoft Windows Vista system. My solution was to install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, and within it, Microsoft Windows 98. I was able to install Micro Focus Visual Object COBOL in Windows 98, and am able to run it with no problems in the Virtual Machine.

(Ref: http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=24439)

If you want to run DOS Business Applications on a modern OS, take a look at vDOS;

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdos/

This is designed to run DOS business programs, such as Microsoft Fortran 4.1.

Good to see another person who appreciates and wants to continue using development tools that do the job, just as good, or better, than the modern development tools.

Joe

 

[rconn]

As Joe said, there's nothing that Take Command can do about this -- you need to run a VM that supports 16-bit applications.

 

[samintz]

WinXP mode used to be a free update for Windows 7. It is a VirtualPC image that is preconfigured to run Windows XP. It has a transparent mode that allows your apps to run as if they were native.

However, any VM is going to be resource hungry. So if you go this route make sure you have a lot of RAM.

I have never tried vDOS. It sounds intriguing.

 

[Umesh]

Gentlemen:

Your advice is extremely timely and useful. I had shuddered at the thought of running a virtual machine, but it seems that there really is no choice. Fortunately, I have a big 64-bit Windows 7 machine with 64GB RAM and a total of 4TB disk space, so resources should not be an issue.

Thanks very much again, and a Happy New Year to all.

Umesh

 

[Steve Pitts]

Umesh,

Not wishing to be too contrarian, but you might be better off porting your Fortran environment to a more up-to-date compiler. Unfortunately I have no direct experience with the current Fortran compilers (although I've successfully used the Open Watcom C compiler for many years, I suspect their Fortran being 77 only will not suit you - it does successfully compile an old version of Dungeon/Zork that I'd been carrying around since the mid 80s!!) but I believe there is a current Gnu Fortran compiler which has a Windows version.

My reason for suggesting that that might be the better medium to long-term route is simply that as time goes on it may become harder and harder to set things up to run environments that will cope with 16-bit code. Microsoft provided Virtual XP mode as a way of helping people upgrade from XP to Windows 7, no more and no less. They junked the support in Windows 8, albeit that it was replaced by the much more flexible and arguably far superior Hyper-V and offered no obvious mechanism to migrate virtual machines from the Virtual PC built in to Windows 7 to Hyper-V in Windows 8. On that basis, assuming that you're not intending to stay on Windows 7 forever (which might be a viable option, although MS would like you to believe that XP mode is just as vulnerable as Windows XP itself now that the OS is no longer receiving updates) then Virtual PC/Virtual XP mode is a dead-end. It has one big advantage, in that you don't need to have a separate Windows XP license. Beyond that, I'm not sure that I'd go there. Your alternative, if you happen to have a valid XP license lying around, is to set up a suitable VM for VMware Player or Oracle Virtualbox (or any other freeware virtual environment of your choice, although sadly not Hyper-V since there is no version that supports Windows 7 as a host), both of which will allow you to create a virtual machine that ought to be portable in future.

Fortran 95 is good enough for 99% of what most people need

A statement that you could make about pretty much any language. Any programming language that you already know is going to be more productive and useful than one you don't but sometimes it is necessary to learn a new language because of the environments in which it is supported. Anything that I can do in PHP can almost certainly be done equally well in REXX, a language that I've been using since the mid-80s and which I can write, debug and test far more quickly than any other - but PHP is far more widely supported for web development and integrates far more easily into the related environments, so it made sense to learn it for such work rather than trying to shoe-horn in something that I knew better.

 

[David Marcus]

The descendant of CVF is Intel Visual Fortran: https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-visual-fortran-compiler-for-windows. When Intel bought CVF, they kept the development team: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/migrating-from-compaq-visual-fortran. Hard to beat Fortran for writing understandable, maintainable scientific code.

 

[cgunhouse]

I had a similar problem with a terminal emulator, the installer was 16-bit but the product was actually 32-bit. While installing the product on XP (32-bit), I monitored the files installed and the registry keys that were added (Process Monitor, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645), I then copied the files that where installed to my Windows 7, 64-bit, PC. I then set the registry entries generated during the XP install on the Window 7 PC and the program works fine. This may work for your compiler too.

 

[jabelli]

The fault is with Microsoft, and not wanting to be backwards compatible.

Not really, Intel and AMD broke the NTVDM. "16-bit Windows (Win16) and DOS applications will not run on x86-64 versions of Windows due to removal of the virtual DOS machine subsystem (NTVDM) which relied upon the ability to use virtual 8086 mode. Virtual 8086 mode cannot be entered while running in long mode." Supporting 16-bit programs would require full emulation, and they already have Virtual PC for that.