From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2019 10:05:02 -0500 Subject: [COFF] In memoriam: Gene Amdahl In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 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 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 > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: