Re: The joy of FORTRAN

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:

The VAX was developed over a decade later, when they put thousands of
transistors on each logic chip and thousands of bits in each memory chip. It
suffered from a severe case of second system syndrome, where they started from
the elegant PDP-11 and added every feature a programmer could ever possibly
want, with less than fabulous performance to match. There's a reason that the
VAX inspired RISC systems.

I've claimed that John Cocke did RISC/801
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cocke_(computer_scientist)
https://www.ibm.com/history/john-cocke
The effort to develop RISC began in 1974, when IBM tasked Cocke and a
team of researchers with creating an exchange controller to automate
telephone switching -- phone calls were then largely handled by human
operators who plugged cords into switchboards. Although IBM canceled the
controller project in 1975, the team's efforts morphed into the creation
of the first prototype computer that used RISC. The new system's power
and efficiency became foundational to computer evolution up to the
present day.

as counter to the Future System complexity, future system
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm
https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html

folklore is that the complexity of "Future System" was countermeasure to
the clone/compatible competition. FS was completely different from 370
and was going to completely replace 370 and internal politics during FS,
was killing off 370 efforts (the lack of new 370 during the period is
credited with given clone 370 makers, including Amdahl, more market
foothold).

All during FS, I continued to work on 370 and would periodically
ridicule FS, including analogy with long playing cult film down in
central sq (lots of blue sky stuff going on with little idea on how it
might be implemented). One of the last nails in the FS coffin was
analysis by the IBM Houston Scientific Center that if 370/195
applications were redone for FS machine made out of the fastest
technology available, it would have throughput of 370/145 (about 30
times slowdown).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970