Viewing profile — dsand

About 360 and pi: In the late 70's, "Two Pi Corporation" of Santa Clara made S/370-clone minicomputers named V/32. In early 1981, Two Pi was acquired by Four Phase Systems of Cuper…

My partner Elaine Gord was on VisiOn's C compiler team in 1982-1984 with two others. They experimented with having two instruction sets: the native 8088 code for best performance, …

Yes, all Tandem full-time employees got paid sabbaticals. And stock options. My partner joined Tandem 2 years after me, so our eligibility for sabbaticals was out of sync. One of u…

The new building has an elaborate plaque facing the sidewalk. It includes a railroad diagram of the many corporate spinoffs from Shockley Semi.

The historical former building stood unchanged until 5-10 years ago. There was a historical plaque on that building. It has been demolished and replaced by a nameless large 5-story…

There are no heirs for LCM. Allen's will specified what do to in particular with a few of his many assets. But for all the rest, he wrote to sell it all, and donate the raised mone…

HP partnered with Intel to bring HP's Playdoh vliw architecture to market, because HP could not afford to continue investing in new leading-edge fabs. Compaq/DEC similarly killed A…

Ancient languages ran on ancient machines with 6-bit character sets. No available way to key in or print lowercase letters.

The 1401 was designed as a stored-program alternative to IBM's never-shipped WWAM World Wide Accounting Machine. WWAM was designed in IBM Europe in 1955. WWAM was to be a low-cost …

Peter Samson ran the Spacewar demo today on CHM's PDP-1.

That is a very interesting article. For how they aim to run existing software by binary translations to an ISA optimized for such binary translations. And how much they dread possi…