81–90 of 114 posts
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.
Flandreau, S.D. is also the home of an indian boarding school. Its not exactly a big town even by local standards.
[edit] love the quote “He’s always been right up there with Seymour Cray or Steve Wozniak,”
We lost Cray too early (f'n drunk driver) much like Jay Miner. I guess I should be grateful that unlike a lot of other professions, we walk the earth at the same time as our legends.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is that you, Nikolai? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov ) ;-)
Explains a lot of Hannu Rajaniemi's "Quantum Thief" trilogy background ("Great Common Task" for those who read it):
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.
1985 as well, as it's how the Atari ST prototype was built; a board per chip, with the boards arranged in a circle around a core. It looked sort of like a little Cray-1.
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/gaming/23-unseen-images-of-...
"In 1946 he married Marian Quissell, who grew up on a farm four miles from his. 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 appear…
"In 1946 he married Marian Quissell, who grew up on a farm four miles from his. 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 appear…
Unless you personally know either of the people involved, I don't think you are in a position to make a judgement as to whether it was "love, sacrifice and reward" or "prevailing cultural pressures at the time that were always regretted later"
Gene Amdahl was remarkable person, both as an engineer and an entrepeneur. The Computer History Museum has a very interesting interview with Gene Amdahl as part of its Oral History Collection - http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102702492 - that is, quite frankly, more interesting than anything I could come up with right now.
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
"In 1946 he married Marian Quissell, who grew up on a farm four miles from his. 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 appear…
Unless you personally know either of the people involved, I don't think you are in a position to make a judgement as to whether it was "love, sacrifice and reward" or "prevailing cultural pressures at the time that were always regretted later"
If you really wanted to be a cold hearted bastard about it you could have done a cost benefit analysis on the potential earnings of a theoretical physicist vs a secretary in the early 1950's before you discounted it from being a financial decision, but then you couldn't have made an opportunistic political statement due to a man's death.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is that you, Nikolai? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov ) ;-)