41–50 of 114 posts
Anybody here who knows more about this? Did IBM have to sell the software for the same price, did they have to give it for free?
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.
soul of a new machine, spends couple of chapters discussing debugging the data-general machine as well. pretty interesting...
I think he deserves a HN Back Bar tribute.
It would seem that HN agree. Black bar is now up.
I think he deserves a HN Back Bar tribute.
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.
When 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
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 IBM rule.
“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.
I think he deserves a HN Back Bar tribute.
I wonder if it would be feasible to do this automatically when the top story contains the word "died" or synonyms thereof.
Also I don't think automatisation of remembrance gestures is a good thing.
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…
The tongue-in-cheek flip side of this coin is that, when discovering something, one should give it a descriptive but complex name. That way, people are more likely to refer to it by the names of the discoverers than by the clumsy descriptive title the discoverers chose. :)