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Gene Amdahl has died

nytimes.com

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Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#91

Post by ciupicri »

frossie wrote: post #85
jusben1369 wrote: post #69

"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"

I thought that the prevailing cultural pressures at the time were about men working and women staying at home.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#92

Post by rodgerd »

acqq wrote: post #41

> 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?

Very old versions of IBM OSes (including MVS and VM) are available for free, much like Sun would subsequently give away SunOS.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#93

Post by selimthegrim »

jmspring wrote: post #8

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.

IN 2006 I saw it in my operating systems/architecture textbook (Bryant/O'Halloran)

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#94

Post by privong »

taneq wrote: post #63
frozenport wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a dissenting opinion: Amdahl's law is obvious and therefore it doesn't need to be explicitly taught.

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.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#95

Post by blacksmythe »

Animats wrote: post #26

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.

In 1985 we were still prototyping with TTL packages.

By 1988 we were using Altera PALs, a big improvement in density. (PALs might have been available sooner, but I was working on microwave systems in the intervening years).

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#96

Post by wmf »

rdl wrote: post #88
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #20

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 wonder what the modern equivalents are. (Also, how to get an Amdahl mug today)

I once put a vendor X sticker on my laptop before a sales meeting with vendor Y. It was the only sticker, so they didn't fail to notice it.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#97

Post by ScottBurson »

ciupicri wrote: post #91
frossie wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

I thought that the prevailing cultural pressures at the time were about men working and women staying at home.

Well, the thrust of it was that the man's career is important, and the woman's isn't. So assuming they had no children at the time, it was entirely consistent with that for her to quit college and take a job with no career path in order to fund his education. (If they had children, of course, the ethic would have been that she should stay home to care for them... indeed, she would likely have had no alternative.)

I think frossie has a good point, actually. We can hope that it was as jusben1369 suggests, but we can't really know that. Maybe being married to Gene gave Marian all she wanted in life, and maybe it didn't.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#98

Post by cpprototypes »

dang wrote: post #45
vive-la-liberte wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty sure it hasn't changed.

Please consider making the black bar a link. When I first saw it, it wasn't clear why there's a black bar. Especially later if the post goes to the second page.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#99

Post by zcdziura »

vdaniuk wrote: post #86
frossie wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Yeah, this comment shouldn't be downvoted so much even if it is offensive to some people.

It's being downvoted not (necessarily) because people think it's offensive, but rather because it's hypocritical.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#100

Post by noonespecial »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #20

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

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.

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