Signetics 8x300 instruction set

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Fri Dec 3 16:54:06 2004

On Fri, 3 Dec 2004, Brad Parker wrote:

> >(There's also some really bad info out there on the origins
> >of "Harvard" architecture, attributed to some stupid hardvard
> >vs. princeton microprocessor design thing. Please -- about 40
> >years earlier: that asshole Aiken. No one liked him anyways.)
>
> (ok, that made my laugh. pretty hard.)
> Aiken. Howard was it?

yup. Now I never met him, of course, but he's pretty roundly
reviled. I'm reading the Babbage Inst's reprint and even there,
it states that though Aiken was a lecturer, that 'he largely
seemed unaware of the importance of what was being discussed
[fully electronic stored-program...] and delved in deeply to
the workings of his relay calculators' (paraphrase from memory)

Apparently working in his shop was like slavery. I've not
read one account that actually liked the guy. Overbearing
empire-builder and Spender of Govt Money. Nice calculators
though.

(The arch ref is that the relay calc programs were stored
on very wide punched tape, external to data storage. They
were truly significant machines of great power and
complexity (logical error-checking, remote consoles,
skip-to-next-queued-up-program-on-error, all sorts of
nicities. He simply was an unpleasant person.)

> Next I think we should rag on Danny Hillis and that silly connection
> machine. I remember asking, "so, with 64 cpus you run 64 compiles at
> one time, right?" and the interviewer said, "no, no ones ever done
> that". I walked out shaking my head and didn't take the job.

TO be honest I don't know much about all the parallel processing
stuff; so they were somewhat silly?
Received on Fri Dec 03 2004 - 16:54:06 GMT