From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)
Subject: [COFF] In memoriam: Gene Amdahl
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2019 10:05:02 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAC20D2NqS2D-GPqbmb1bzhOOkV5zM3e-eZ-9a1Gi76hktwRO7Q@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.1911100909300.11612@aneurin.horsfall.org>
According to my friend Russ Robulen (his coworker, lead on the 360/50,
worked on /91 and later lead for the IBM ASC), Amdahl wanted the byte to
be 7-bits for S/360, but Fred Brook's overruled him. Brooks was said to
have thrown Amdahl out his office and told him "not come back unless it was
a power of 2", as "he could not program it sanely otherwise." Amdahl
semi-won the 24/32 bit war. Brooks let he have a 24 bit basic word, only
if it stored it as 32 bits and ensured that all pointers were stored in the
same. Russ says that Amdahl always thought both choices were a terrible
waste of hardware. Gordon Bell later said, those two choices were the
most important in S/360's lasting impact.
Clem
On Sat, Nov 9, 2019 at 5:10 PM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> We lost computer architect Gene Amdahl on this day in 2015; responsible
> for "Amdahl's Law" (referring to parallel computing), he had a hand in the
> IBM-704, the System/360, and founded Amdahl Corporation (a clone of the
> 360/370 series).
>
> -- Dave
> _______________________________________________
> COFF mailing list
> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-11-11 15:05 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-11-09 22:09 dave
2019-11-11 15:05 ` clemc [this message]
2019-11-11 21:38 ` dave
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2018-11-10 0:18 dave
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