Well, the next time you are in 1985, using a 68000 based
micro with 3Meg RAM (WooT!) and dual 8" floppies, please
stop by the High Voltage Research Lab at MIT and slip
me a bootleg copy of GINO that will work on that hardware.

I'd have loved to not have to write (and rewrite) so much
code -- the final total was only about 50,000 LOC, 66%%
F77, 31%% 68k asm and 2%% Pascal. Hacking dynamic memory
allocation onto F77 using asm and Pascal was a bigger
pain than all the graphics routines needed. At least when
the machine crashed, I could fire up my program again and
recover data from RAM. Without that capability it would
probably have taken several more years to finish the PhD.

You work with what you've got or you write your own. Today,
we've got a heck of lot, so mostly we don't have to write
our own. But even a few decades ago ...