I think he deserves a HN Back Bar tribute.
Would it make sense to pin the relevant post to the top of the page when HN does a Black Bar tribute?
Gene Amdahl has died
101–110 of 114 posts
Re: Gene Amdahl has died
#102When an IBM salesman saw a coffee cup with the Amdahl Logo at a customers site, he was instructed to cut one million dollar of his price offer. That was the one million dollar coffee mug. http://dealwhisperers.blogspot.co.il/2015/07/a-million-dolla... here is a picture of it http://www.deadprogrammer.com/fud-you
You have to wonder about the management at IBM that made him unhappy enough to leave in the first place. That kind of guy is going to do what he's going to do now matter what. Whether he does it for you or in competition against you is the only question. There are very few lengths management shouldn't have gone to keep a guy like that happy at IBM.
He disagreed with their technical staff about how to design a mainframe.
The technical staff said that the operating system should run on microcode to abstract away the hardware. That way it would be easier for customers to migrate to new hardware as it became available. And they could easily add a new instruction if they needed to.
Gene said that it would be an order of magnitude faster if it ran directly on the hardware, and it wasn't that hard to support that API going forward.
Both proved right. Gene built computers that were massively faster than IBM's and perfectly compatible. IBM then added an instruction in micro-code and made all of their software use it. Gene's installed base all crashed on IBM's new code, while IBM's was fine. The US government launched an anti-trust lawsuit, which wound up binding IBM's hands for many years after.
IBM mainframes today still run on micro-code. And it still makes them massively slower than they need to be, but with better backwards compatibility. The mainframe world depends on a lot of programs from the 1960s and 1970s that runs, unchanged, today. Everyone else is using native instructions and runs faster.
Re: Gene Amdahl has died
#103Honest 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 went to Maryland and yeah it came up in the Concurrency course
Re: Gene Amdahl has died
#104> With funding from Fujitsu, he formed the Amdahl Corporation, setting up offices in Sunnyvale, Calif. I didn't realize that the tradition of "avoid SV VC and get funding for cheap from an overseas operating company" went so far back.
It also ruined the company. They spent a lot of money on a potential merger with StorageTek, only for it to go down the drain when Fujitsu claimed that it's legal right to a percentage on products sold would be applicable to the complete combined company as well (source: I work with a bunch of ex StorageTek guys).
Re: Gene Amdahl has died
#105When an IBM salesman saw a coffee cup with the Amdahl Logo at a customers site, he was instructed to cut one million dollar of his price offer. That was the one million dollar coffee mug. http://dealwhisperers.blogspot.co.il/2015/07/a-million-dolla... here is a picture of it http://www.deadprogrammer.com/fud-you
I wonder what the modern equivalents are. (Also, how to get an Amdahl mug today)
We at Cumulus have been told by our customers that having one of our rocket-turtle stickers on their laptop results in a much faster and easier negotiations about discounts with their Cisco sales rep. An Arista sticker probably works too.
It is one of the reasons we made the stickers. =)
Re: Gene Amdahl has died
#106When an IBM salesman saw a coffee cup with the Amdahl Logo at a customers site, he was instructed to cut one million dollar of his price offer. That was the one million dollar coffee mug. http://dealwhisperers.blogspot.co.il/2015/07/a-million-dolla... here is a picture of it http://www.deadprogrammer.com/fud-you
Amdahl sales people telling customers "this mug will get you a $1m discount if you ask for it" is not the same as IBM instructing sales people to discount $1m if they see the mug. Obviously, knowing that your client is considering a rival company would make you consider dropping your price, but unless you have a better source I'm going to assume it was just nice spin around that fact from Amdahl people, not an actual…
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Re: Gene Amdahl has died
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to wonder about the management at IBM that made him unhappy enough to leave in the first place. That kind of guy is going to do what he's going to do now matter what. Whether he does it for you or in competition against you is the only question. There are very few lengths management shouldn't have gone to keep a guy like that happy at IBM.
He disagreed with their technical staff about how to design a mainframe. The technical staff said that the operating system should run on microcode to abstract away the hardware. That way it would be easier for customers to migrate to new hardware as it became available. And they could easily add a new instruction if they needed to. Gene said that it would be an order of magnitude faster if it ran directly on the har…
A good opportunity to mention the Popek-Goldberg criteria. If Amdahl's machines had been able to efficiently trap on the use of the new instruction (and execute a workaround using their existing instruction set) they might have been OK. Depends what the instruction was used for. Popek-Goldberg discusses the case where you want to virtualise your hardware: instruction set design becomes really important.
Re: Gene Amdahl has died
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your (apparently unpopular) opinion. I'd never heard of this as a named law before, but it's just a restatement of critical path analysis in a computing context.
> I agree with your (apparently unpopular) opinion. I'd never heard of this as a named law before, but it's just a restatement of critical path analysis in a computing context. I suspect it's one of those things that seems obvious in hindsight or in the context of how computers work today. But when it was first discussed, it may not have been as obvious.
I understand it was used as a marketing punchline. Further, the gripe that systems wouldn't scale turned out to be a challenge rather than a death sentence.
Re: Gene Amdahl has died
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to wonder about the management at IBM that made him unhappy enough to leave in the first place. That kind of guy is going to do what he's going to do now matter what. Whether he does it for you or in competition against you is the only question. There are very few lengths management shouldn't have gone to keep a guy like that happy at IBM.
He disagreed with their technical staff about how to design a mainframe. The technical staff said that the operating system should run on microcode to abstract away the hardware. That way it would be easier for customers to migrate to new hardware as it became available. And they could easily add a new instruction if they needed to. Gene said that it would be an order of magnitude faster if it ran directly on the har…
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Re: Gene Amdahl has died
#110> With funding from Fujitsu, he formed the Amdahl Corporation, setting up offices in Sunnyvale, Calif. I didn't realize that the tradition of "avoid SV VC and get funding for cheap from an overseas operating company" went so far back.
IBM totally dominated the computer industry. You couldn't get American funding to take on IBM.