Some of us think that the Hennesey and Patterson book is the worst thing to happen to computer architecture ever. The obsession with performance, as measured by broken benchmarks written in languages which are incapable of rational expression made the entire field a bad joke. The only thing that saved their collective butt was the improvement in silicon technology. Imagine what we could do with that technology and a decent architecture and language. On Jun 4, 2006, at 1:39 PM, Henry Baker wrote:
Hennessey & Patterson's book "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" put the last nail in the coffin re pretty order codes:
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/context/386764/0
Any mention in a modern computer architecture class of pdp-6/10, etc., order codes elicits the same sort of giggles that are also associated with Lionel train sets, tie bars, pocket protectors and slide rules. An inconvenient truth is that those things got us to the Moon, and (at least as of yet) WinXP & 4GHz Pentia haven't been able to get us back there.
I'm afraid we're now all considered dinosaurs.
At 03:43 AM 6/4/2006, R. William Gosper wrote:
Markoff is remarkably accurate, although it is a crime that tangential involvement with Spacewar outweighs
He went on to spend 34 years at Digital Equipment in a number of roles. He was the chief architect of the PDP-10 family of computers [...] Starting with the PDP-6. These have to have the most beautiful order codes of any machine ever, and should have had a greater influence on future architectures and languages. --rwg
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