Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 2/25/25 10:48 PM, Lynn Wheeler wrote:

Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:

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).

  late 70s, there was a plan to replace the large myriod of different
internal CISC microprocessors, architectures, programming (controllers,
low & mid-range 370s, as400 followon to s/38, etc) with common RISC and
common software programing. For various reasons all these floundered and
things returned to doing custom CISC ... and saw some number of the
engineers leave for other vendors.
 RISC ROMP was going to be for the DISPLAYWRITER follow-on running CP.r
and PL.8 ... but it got canceled (lot of that market was moving to
PCs). It was then decided to pivot to the unix workstation market and
they got the company that had done AT&T UNIX port to the IBM/PC for
PC/IX to do "AIX" for PC/RT (follow-on was mutli-chip RIOS for RS/6000).
 IBM 801
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_801
The First RISC: John Cocke and the IBM 801
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33055361
 Computer Chronicles Revisited 65 -- The IBM RT PC
https://www.smoliva.blog/post/computer-chronicles-revisited-065-ibm-rt-pc/
... note in above: Birnbaum had been head of (IBM Research) Yorktown
Computer Science and some people that had been working late 70s on 801
left for HP Labs ... and I got email asking if I might be joining them.
 I was in San Jose Research, but also had offices&labs out in Los Gatos
VLSI labs that were doing "Blue Iliad" (1st 32bit 801/risc chip
... large, hot chip, never came to fruition).
 Before announced/ship, IBM executive Nick Donofrio approved HA/6000
product, originally for NYTimes to move their newspaper system (ATEX)
off VAXCluster to RS/6000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_High_Availability_Cluster_Multiprocessing
I rename it HA/CMP when I start doing technical/scientific cluster
scale-up with national labs (LANL, NCAR, LLNL, etc) and commercial
cluster scale-up with RDBMS vendors (Oracle, Sybase, Ingres, Informix)
that had VAXCluster support in same source base with unix (I do a
distributed lock manager that support VAXCluster API semantics to
simplify port). Then IBM S/88 product administer starts taking us around
to their customers and also gets me to write a section for the corporate
continuouus available strategy document (it gets pulled when both
Rochester/AS400 and POK/mainframe complain that they can't meet the
requirements)
 Early Jan1992, have meeing with Oracle CEO, IBM/AWD executive Hester
tells Ellison that we would have 16-system clusters mid92 and 128-system
cluster ye92. Then late Jan1992, cluster scale-up is transferred for
announce as IBM Supercomputer (technical/scientific *ONLY*) and we are
told we can't work on anything with more than four processors (we leave
IBM a few months later).

   Late 70's and 80s there were a HUGE number of "new and
   better plans". Everybody had a Better Idea how to make
   and organize CPUs and everything else.
   Almost NONE of that idealistic stuff panned-out.
   Simple, straight-up, was pretty much better - or
   at least a lot easier to cope with.