61–70 of 114 posts
“By sheer intellectual force, plus some argument and banging on the table, he maintained architectural consistency across six engineering teams,” said Frederick P. Brooks Jr. This is one of the more impressive things to me. Keeping that many people on the same page is an amazing feat.
[1] Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"
Honest question for those who got received CS/Engineering degrees in the last 10 years, did Amdahl's Law come up? I've seen programming courses go away from assembler/c/c++ over the years to Java and then scripting languages at a couple local schools. I wonder if the history/theory side changed as well.
Honest question for those who got received CS/Engineering degrees in the last 10 years, did Amdahl's Law come up? I've seen programming courses go away from assembler/c/c++ over the years to Java and then scripting languages at a couple local schools. I wonder if the history/theory side changed as well.
I have a dissenting opinion: Amdahl's law is obvious and therefore it doesn't need to be explicitly taught.
FUD was first defined with its specific current meaning by Gene Amdahl the same year, 1975, after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp.: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products."[
Died? I'm pretty sure he's just been swapped into a context that we don't have access to and is running in parallel with us. RIP
I have faith we'll eventually be able to restore all those important processes. It's really hard to destroy information. We just need a way to read it back.
;-)
(IBM).1960s+1970s = (Apple+Microsoft+Google+Dell+OpenSource).today
for many reasons, but mostly because of the 360 Series, upon which I and many my age got started.
I don't miss the COBOL ENVIRONMENT DIVISION or the punch cards much, but I do miss the technical brilliance which captured the industry.
RIP Sweet Genius
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moreover, he never wrote down the "law" that is now attributed to him---a marketing coup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy strikes again.
Stigler's law - that is, the fact that eponyms often deny credit for an invention to many people who were relevant for it - is one of the reasons why I try to avoid eponymy where possible. The other reason is that eponymy is often a symptom of laziness. Rather than finding a good, descriptive name for something, you end up with an eponym that is not at all evocative of the meaning behind it. For example, and without…
I met Gene Amdahl once, when I took a summer course in computer architecture at UCSC. We got a tour of the Amdahl plant. They had a huge prototype CPU built out of TTL, which they built before making custom ICs. Each board in the prototype became one IC. Each row of cards in the prototype became one board. Each rack became one row of cards. That was how you debugged hardware designs in 1975.
He received his bachelor’s degree in 1948 from South Dakota State University, in Brookings, where his wife worked as a secretary. She had dropped out of Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D., after her freshman year to go to work to help pay for her husband’s education."
- What a nice story of love, sacrifice and reward given they appeared to have stayed together till the end.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would seem that HN agree. Black bar is now up.
The black bar looks strange on my tablet, not like I remember it from last time. The black is now about 1/7th of the bar and the remainder is orange. I seem to recall that the entire bar was black last time they did it, which I think worked much better.