Was Apple III Fortran a real product? I read references to it from Apple from a couple of brochures/magazine articles, but do not see it listed on any price list. I recently viewed a YouTube video on the Apple III and the author showed a program selector screen with Apple III Fortran as a option to select. Is Apple III Fortran available to download somewhere?
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Yes, it was a real thing. It came as a separate compiler for Apple III Pascal. So, you use the standard Pascal environment to edit your files. But then you execute the separate Fortran compiler, instead of launching the Pascal compiler. You could also build mixed applications (link libraries/code from Pascal + Fortran).
Manual and disks can be found on asimov:
Apple III Fortran Reference Manual
And here is a disk which contains the Fortran compiler files, which the manual mentions:
APPLE-3-WAP-pcl-19a.dsk
There were a few faculty in the Engineering school at the University I attended back in the day that used Apple /// Fortran. The University bought a very large number of Apple /// units betweed 1980-1982. Pretty much every departmental secretary had one on their desk as did a lot of Professors. Of course Fortran was a requirement for Engineering in those days. Most of the instructional work was done on an IBM plug compatible mainframe (National Semiconductor) using IBM's Fortran 77 or some on the VAX/VMS cluster using VMS Fortran. All this was before the IBM PC even existed, so the main alternative to the Apple /// for Fortran would have been CP/M, but there was no clear cut choice for that available through the University purchasing system. A few years later they had a relationship with Zenith but not really until the MS-DOS era. At that time they also started getting other minis with Fortran available or early workstations. 68k based Sun and HP and Apollo.
Anyway... thankfully I myself, not being a CS student rather than Engineering, I never had to take Fortran... Or COBOL (requirement of the MIS department). If I rememebr right there was an Apple /// COBOL that worked similarly to the Fortran using Apple's UCSD Pascal system.