71–80 of 114 posts
I wonder if there will ever be some kind of statue or memorial for one of those founding parents. Ada Lovelace, Alonzo Church, Grace Hopper, John McCarthy, Haskell Curry, Seymour Cray, Gene Amdahl... I'm sure that list is too short.
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.
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
I'm so doing that next time I buy a new car.
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.
> Amdahl also benefited from antitrust settlements between IBM and the Justice Department, which required IBM to make its mainframe software available to competitors. 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?
It meant that Amdahl's (and other manufacturer's) customers could buy IBM software and run it on non-IBM hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1969:_Antitrust...
"After the unbundling, IBM software was divided into two main categories: System Control Programming (SCP), which remained free to customers, and Program Products (PP), which were charged for."
So what were Amdahl's customers able to get? Didn't they get System Control Software from IBM (1)? Was it free for them?
1) I've found the Computerworld 1 Nov 1976 article mentioning IBM's MVT 21.8 running on Amdahl's 470.
“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 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.
> 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...
http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...
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.
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.