The IRTF standard evolved from a series of workshops held at
Purdue University in the early 1970s. The Fortran committee created a proposal which was approved and published by the
Instrument Society of America (ISA) as ISA Standard S61.1 (1972). The paper defined library calls for controlling the state of concurrently activated programs, process I/O, and bit manipulation. A second supplementary paper, ISA S61.2 (1973) was published a year later. This paper defined additional calls for random unformatted files, and bit manipulation. Additional work, including work on management of parallel tasks, was performed both in the U.S. as S61.3, and in Germany as
Prozess-FORTRAN. In 1980, a joint American/European proposal was published. While IRTF held some influence in certain markets in the 1970s, by the early 1980s most process control systems were being built using
microprocessor-based systems where Fortran was not available. Because of this, the IRTF bindings have fallen into disuse. Modern systems tend to use
POSIX Threads instead. == References ==