dsand

8 ms·

1.
by dsand 6mo ago
About 360 and pi: In the late 70's, "Two Pi Corporation" of Santa Clara made S/370-clone minicomputers named V/32. In early 1981, Two Pi was acquired by Four Phase Systems of Cupertino, a maker of early PMOS cpus.
2.
by dsand 10mo ago
My partner Elaine Gord was on VisiOn's C compiler team in 1982-1984 with two others. They experimented with having two instruction sets: the native 8088 code for best performance, and a C virtual machine bytecode for code density. Th
3.
by dsand 2y ago
Yes, all Tandem full-time employees got paid sabbaticals. And stock options. My partner joined Tandem 2 years after me, so our eligibility for sabbaticals was out of sync. One of us would have to defer our next sabbatical for 2 years to g
4.
by dsand 2y ago
The new building has an elaborate plaque facing the sidewalk. It includes a railroad diagram of the many corporate spinoffs from Shockley Semi.
5.
by dsand 2y ago
The historical former building stood unchanged until 5-10 years ago. There was a historical plaque on that building. It has been demolished and replaced by a nameless large 5-story office building.
6.
by dsand 2y ago
There are no heirs for LCM. Allen's will specified what do to in particular with a few of his many assets. But for all the rest, he wrote to sell it all, and donate the raised money to charities. So the will's executor (his sis
7.
by dsand 3y ago
HP partnered with Intel to bring HP's Playdoh vliw architecture to market, because HP could not afford to continue investing in new leading-edge fabs. Compaq/DEC similarly killed Alpha shortly before getting acquired by HP, becau
8.
by dsand 3y ago
Ancient languages ran on ancient machines with 6-bit character sets. No available way to key in or print lowercase letters.
9.
by dsand 3y ago
The 1401 was designed as a stored-program alternative to IBM's never-shipped WWAM World Wide Accounting Machine. WWAM was designed in IBM Europe in 1955. WWAM was to be a low-cost plugboard-programmed transistor computer to handle th
10.
by dsand 4y ago
Peter Samson ran the Spacewar demo today on CHM's PDP-1.
11.
by dsand 6y ago
That is a very interesting article. For how they aim to run existing software by binary translations to an ISA optimized for such binary translations. And how much they dread possibly being cut off from foreign foundries and ARM and x86 c