Intel releases oneAPI Toolkit, free, Fortran 2018

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Not quite. Here is the sequence…

  1. DEC ported DEC Fortran 90 to Windows NT on Alpha processors - already had it for VMS and DEC/OSF1 (UNIX). It was command-line only and didn’t see much use.

  2. DEC approached Microsoft about licensing the Visual Studio IDE for the Alpha product. By that time, Microsoft was realizing that they would need to put in a lot of effort to bring their Fortran PowerStation product up to Fortran 95 (and resolve the many bugs). MS didn’t want to make this sort of investment and suggested instead that DEC take over for them in the X86 market. MS licensed Visual Studio '98 to DEC, along with the MSVC libraries, as well as other components such as the QuickWin library and Windows API declarations.

  3. DEC released Digital Visual Fortran 5 in 1997 and Microsoft withdrew Fortran PowerStation 4 from the market. This was DEC’s Fortran 90 compiler and (mostly) run-time library, with almost all of the PowerStation extensions added in. Alpha was supported too (on NT).

  4. In 1999, Compaq bought DEC. DVF became CVF (6.5 by then), the color scheme changed to red, and that was about it.

  5. August 2001, Intel acquires the Compaq Fortran team, some of the Compaq C++ team and most of the remaining Alpha engineering team. The Fortran team’s task was to throw out the (excellent) GEM compiler backend and replace it with Intel’s IL0. An Intel manager predicted it would take six months.

  6. September 2001, HP acquires Compaq. Note that this timeline means that at no time were we HP employees. The acquisition added some complications for the Intel deal, but they were eventually worked out. CVF continued with a minor update (6.6) and bug fixes

  7. 2004, Intel Visual Fortran 8 (previous Intel version was 7) was released, along with Intel Fortran for Linux. (Six months - right!) Itanium (remember that?) support was added. DEC had been working on a Linux version for a while, prior to the Intel deal, but never released it. Initially, it required that you have Visual Studio .NET already installed, but as of version 10, MS offered a “Premier Partner Edition” of VS that had the necessary bits, and Intel licensed that.

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