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Gene Amdahl has died
- orionblastar 11y agoHe really invented a lot of good mainframe technology. Worked at IBM and then left to make his own company to compete with IBM making IBM Mainframe clones that ran faster and cost less than an IBM Mainframe. I grew up in the era that used IBM 360/370 mainframes and I learned them in college for FORTRAN and COBOL and JCL with DOS/VSE. I don't think colleges teach mainframe technology anymore now that PCs have taken over. Things moved from PCs to mobile devices so quick as well. Edit;Typo
- mbreese 11y agoFor those who may not have heard of him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
- gepoch 11y agoAmdahl's law is such a powerful idea. I use it to prioritize development items every week if not every day. Always sad to see a story like this on hacker news. I'll be talking about his ideas for the rest of my career, guaranteed.
- redroo 11y agoThe purpose of Amdahl's 1967 paper was to dissuade customers that multiprocessors were cost-effective (read: more expensive for him to produce at Amdahl Corp). In a certain sense, he was correct. Ironically, however, that same paper is now the most quoted in the parallel processing literature. Moreover, he never wrote down the "law" that is now attributed to him---a marketing coup.
- jdale27 11y agoMoreover, he never wrote down the "law" that is now attributed to him---a marketing coup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy strikes again.
- nhaehnle 11y agoStigler's law - that is, the fact that eponyms often deny credit for an invention to many people who were relevant for it - is one of the reasons why I try to avoid eponymy where possible. The other reason is that eponymy is often a symptom of laziness. Rather than finding a good, descriptive name for something, you end up with an eponym that is not at all evocative of the meaning behind it. For example, and without putting too much thought into it, Amdahl's law could have been called something like law of scaling or law of bottlenecks.
- privong 11y ago> The other reason is that eponymy is often a symptom of laziness. Rather than finding a good, descriptive name for something, you end up with an eponym that is not at all evocative of the meaning behind it. The tongue-in-cheek flip side of this coin is that, when discovering something, one should give it a descriptive but complex name. That way, people are more likely to refer to it by the names of the discoverers than by the clumsy descriptive title the discoverers chose. :)
- rbonvall 11y agoI completely agree with nhaehnle's law.
- techdragon 11y agoI think he deserves a HN Back Bar tribute.
- jacquesm 11y agoAgreed, one of the giants.
- cperciva 11y agoI wonder if it would be feasible to do this automatically when the top story contains the word "died" or synonyms thereof.
- ajuc 11y ago"Java is dead"-like posts would trigger it. Also I don't think automatisation of remembrance gestures is a good thing.
- cperciva 11y agoHmm, you're right about hyperbolic deaths. But I rather like the idea of the black bar being effectively triggered by a consensus of HN users rather than waiting for an admin.
- Intermernet 11y agoIt would seem that HN agree. Black bar is now up.
- vive-la-liberte 11y agoThe black bar looks strange on my tablet, not like I remember it from last time. The black is now about 1/7th of the bar and the remainder is orange. I seem to recall that the entire bar was black last time they did it, which I think worked much better.
- dang 11y ago
- hkmurakami 11y ago> With funding from Fujitsu, he formed the Amdahl Corporation, setting up offices in Sunnyvale, Calif. I didn't realize that the tradition of "avoid SV VC and get funding for cheap from an overseas operating company" went so far back.
- monocasa 11y agoIt also ruined the company. They spent a lot of money on a potential merger with StorageTek, only for it to go down the drain when Fujitsu claimed that it's legal right to a percentage on products sold would be applicable to the complete combined company as well (source: I work with a bunch of ex StorageTek guys).
- scholia 11y agoIBM totally dominated the computer industry. You couldn't get American funding to take on IBM.
- jmspring 11y agoHonest question for those who got received CS/Engineering degrees in the last 10 years, did Amdahl's Law come up? I've seen programming courses go away from assembler/c/c++ over the years to Java and then scripting languages at a couple local schools. I wonder if the history/theory side changed as well.
- Blackthorn 11y agoFor me, yes.
- mindcrime 11y agoI did a degree in High Performance Computing and Amdahl's Law came up there. It never came up back when I was working on my undergrad C.S degree, but I didn't finish my degree either, so maybe it would have eventually.
- etrain 11y agoI published a paper this year that used it directly and even proposed a modification of it to model job time for a distributed execution environment with a centralized master governing scheduling, task serialization, etc. When you talk scale-out of any large system, or manycore whatever, Amdahl's law is absolutely fundamental, and when you hear someone say "perfect horizontal scalability," Amdahl's law governs when that will no longer be true. People who do theory on distributed algorithms use it even if they don't realize it.
- tjohns 11y agoAmdahl's Law definitely came up in my undergrad CE/CS courses at USC. I'm not sure how you could teach a computer architecture or processor design class and not mention it. And for what it's worth, we still covered C/C++ and assembly (MIPS + x86), in addition to Java.
- bricestacey 11y agoCS degree. Never heard of it. I graduated about 5 years ago.
- 11y ago
- krylon 11y agoGene Amdahl was remarkable person, both as an engineer and an entrepeneur. The Computer History Museum has a very interesting interview with Gene Amdahl as part of its Oral History Collection - http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102702492 http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102702492 - that is, quite frankly, more interesting than anything I could come up with right now.
- cooper12 11y agoThe oral history is quite interesting and in depth. It really helps to get to know him. Thank you for sharing.
- circlecrimson 11y agoWe really need to rid the world of Alzheimer as soon as possible. The bittersweet thing is that today's golden era titans of innovation may not live long enough for these anti-aging treatments to be deployed.
- avmich 11y agoI highly suspect those titans of innovations - in many areas - just happen to be among the first to get to relatively low hanging fruits in a new area... This pattern repeats in many fields. Not to diminish Amdahl's achievements, of course.
- mike_hearn 11y agoSure. I mean, I expect to read similar obituaries one day for the computer science giants of today, like Jeff Dean (hopefully not for a very long time!). Amdahl's bio makes it sound like he was an effective engineer and good at business too, but that his career was somewhat empty of success after he left Amdahl. That should not detract from his earlier achievements. Very few people have an unbroken track record of sustained success across their whole career.
- LandoCalrissian 11y ago“By sheer intellectual force, plus some argument and banging on the table, he maintained architectural consistency across six engineering teams,” said Frederick P. Brooks Jr. This is one of the more impressive things to me. Keeping that many people on the same page is an amazing feat.
- tempodox 11y agoIndeed, combining the intellectual prowess with the necessary banging on the table is a valuable mix.
- pjmorris 11y agoFred Brooks might've been thinking of him when he wrote "Thinkers are rare; doers are rarer; and thinker-doers are rarest." [1] [1] Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"
- cafard 11y agoBrooks's interview at the Computer History Museum mentions an argument over byte size: "Gene and I each quit once that week, quit the company, and Manny Piore got us back together." (http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/11/102658255-05-01-acc.pdf http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...)
- MichaelMoser123 11y agoWhen an IBM salesman saw a coffee cup with the Amdahl Logo at a customers site, he was instructed to cut one million dollar of his price offer. That was the one million dollar coffee mug. http://dealwhisperers.blogspot.co.il/2015/07/a-million-dollar-coffee-cup.html http://dealwhisperers.blogspot.co.il/2015/07/a-million-dolla... here is a picture of it http://www.deadprogrammer.com/fud-you http://www.deadprogrammer.com/fud-you
- corin_ 11y agoAmdahl sales people telling customers "this mug will get you a $1m discount if you ask for it" is not the same as IBM instructing sales people to discount $1m if they see the mug. Obviously, knowing that your client is considering a rival company would make you consider dropping your price, but unless you have a better source I'm going to assume it was just nice spin around that fact from Amdahl people, not an actual IBM rule.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- chiph 11y ago> I casually rested on his desk the brochure for the Y Model car from the dealership next door. I'm so doing that next time I buy a new car.
- rdl 11y agoI wonder what the modern equivalents are. (Also, how to get an Amdahl mug today)
- wmf 11y agoI once put a vendor X sticker on my laptop before a sales meeting with vendor Y. It was the only sticker, so they didn't fail to notice it.
- kijiki 11y agoWe at Cumulus have been told by our customers that having one of our rocket-turtle stickers on their laptop results in a much faster and easier negotiations about discounts with their Cisco sales rep. An Arista sticker probably works too. It is one of the reasons we made the stickers. =)
- jhallenworld 11y agoI wonder if it's worth it for someone else to try to make a mainframe clone. I remember some company selling the Hercules emulator on an HP IA64 machine- PSI I think. It would be fun to try to make an FPGA version. Oh yeah, PSI: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/02/ibm_buys_psi/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/02/ibm_buys_psi/
- Animats 11y agoI met Gene Amdahl once, when I took a summer course in computer architecture at UCSC. We got a tour of the Amdahl plant. They had a huge prototype CPU built out of TTL, which they built before making custom ICs. Each board in the prototype became one IC. Each row of cards in the prototype became one board. Each rack became one row of cards. That was how you debugged hardware designs in 1975.
- signa11 11y ago> That was how you debugged hardware designs in 1975. soul of a new machine, spends couple of chapters discussing debugging the data-general machine as well. pretty interesting...
- chiph 11y agoIf anyone new to the industry (software or hardware) hasn't read this yet -- you really really should. We had an MV-8000 at college and it performed quite well, considering the loads we threw at it (I recall it running ADA, COBOL, and Pascal compilers all at the same time) http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316491977 http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...
- kabdib 11y ago1985 as well, as it's how the Atari ST prototype was built; a board per chip, with the boards arranged in a circle around a core. It looked sort of like a little Cray-1.
- EvanAnderson 11y agoA very similar story w/ the Amiga: http://www.techradar.com/us/news/gaming/23-unseen-images-of-rare-commodore-amiga-prototypes-1299744 http://www.techradar.com/us/news/gaming/23-unseen-images-of-...
- blacksmythe 11y agoIn 1985 we were still prototyping with TTL packages. By 1988 we were using Altera PALs, a big improvement in density. (PALs might have been available sooner, but I was working on microwave systems in the intervening years).
- dang 11y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10555794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10555794.
- jgrahamc 11y agoDied? I'm pretty sure he's just been swapped into a context that we don't have access to and is running in parallel with us. RIP
- rbanffy 11y agoI have faith we'll eventually be able to restore all those important processes. It's really hard to destroy information. We just need a way to read it back.
- nkoren 11y agoIs that you, Nikolai? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov) ;-)
- bd 11y agoThank you for this reference. Explains a lot of Hannu Rajaniemi's "Quantum Thief" trilogy background ("Great Common Task" for those who read it): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief
- rbanffy 11y agoI do not perceive myself to be Nikolai, but I do not trust my memories enough to claim I could not possibly be him, provided someone had the needed technologies to interfere with this timeline and my memories of it.
- acqq 11y ago> Amdahl also benefited from antitrust settlements between IBM and the Justice Department, which required IBM to make its mainframe software available to competitors. Anybody here who knows more about this? Did IBM have to sell the software for the same price, did they have to give it for free?
- simonh 11y agoIt meant that Amdahl's (and other manufacturer's) customers could buy IBM software and run it on non-IBM hardware.
- acqq 11y agoI still don't know the answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1969:_Antitrust.2C_the_Unbundling_of_software_and_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1969:_Antitrust... "After the unbundling, IBM software was divided into two main categories: System Control Programming (SCP), which remained free to customers, and Program Products (PP), which were charged for." So what were Amdahl's customers able to get? Didn't they get System Control Software from IBM (1)? Was it free for them? 1) I've found the Computerworld 1 Nov 1976 article mentioning IBM's MVT 21.8 running on Amdahl's 470.
- simonh 11y agoSCP remained bundled with the hardware, so you only got it if you bought the hardware, but if you bought the software it belonged to you so you could run it on whatever hardware you liked. I suppose if you bought both an IBM and a non-IBM mainframe you could take the SCP from IBM and run it on a non-IBM box, but I'm not sure if that was addressed in the ruling. The point was to decouple software sales from hardware sales when it came to commercial (sold) software.
- rodgerd 11y agoVery old versions of IBM OSes (including MVS and VM) are available for free, much like Sun would subsequently give away SunOS.
- tempodox 11y agoI wonder if there will ever be some kind of statue or memorial for one of those founding parents. Ada Lovelace, Alonzo Church, Grace Hopper, John McCarthy, Haskell Curry, Seymour Cray, Gene Amdahl... I'm sure that list is too short.
- acheron 11y agoThere's a small memorial for Grace Hopper in Arlington: http://parks.arlingtonva.us/locations/grace-murray-hopper-park/ http://parks.arlingtonva.us/locations/grace-murray-hopper-pa...
- rbanffy 11y agoOne minute of zeroes.
- nns 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt FUD was first defined with its specific current meaning by Gene Amdahl the same year, 1975, after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp.: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products."[
- edw519 11y agoMost people don't grok that (IBM).1960s+1970s = (Apple+Microsoft+Google+Dell+OpenSource).today for many reasons, but mostly because of the 360 Series, upon which I and many my age got started. I don't miss the COBOL ENVIRONMENT DIVISION or the punch cards much, but I do miss the technical brilliance which captured the industry. RIP Sweet Genius
- jusben1369 11y ago"In 1946 he married Marian Quissell, who grew up on a farm four miles from his. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1948 from South Dakota State University, in Brookings, where his wife worked as a secretary. She had dropped out of Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D., after her freshman year to go to work to help pay for her husband’s education." - What a nice story of love, sacrifice and reward given they appeared to have stayed together till the end.
- frossie 11y agoUnless you personally know either of the people involved, I don't think you are in a position to make a judgement as to whether it was "love, sacrifice and reward" or "prevailing cultural pressures at the time that were always regretted later"
- vdaniuk 11y agoYeah, this comment shouldn't be downvoted so much even if it is offensive to some people.
- zcdziura 11y agoIt's being downvoted not (necessarily) because people think it's offensive, but rather because it's hypocritical.
- pdeuchler 11y agoHow does that make a difference? We're supposed to discount his wife's sacrifice because of potential social pressures? If you really wanted to be a cold hearted bastard about it you could have done a cost benefit analysis on the potential earnings of a theoretical physicist vs a secretary in the early 1950's before you discounted it from being a financial decision, but then you couldn't have made an opportunistic political statement due to a man's death.
- ciupicri 11y agoI thought that the prevailing cultural pressures at the time were about men working and women staying at home.
- protomyth 11y agoAt university, we used an IBM 370 for most of our programming classes. The 370 assembler was interesting to program on after learning 6502 assembler in high school and using 6809 for an EE class. I still have my banana book. Flandreau, S.D. is also the home of an indian boarding school. Its not exactly a big town even by local standards. [edit] love the quote “He’s always been right up there with Seymour Cray or Steve Wozniak,” We lost Cray too early (f'n drunk driver) much like Jay Miner. I guess I should be grateful that unlike a lot of other professions, we walk the earth at the same time as our legends.
- oldpond 11y agoFond memories. I was working for a financial services company when we went from an IBM mainframe complex to an Amdahl one. Besides being responsible for data center automation I was facilities manager, so I was in charge of the project. It only took 3 weeks to complete the entire migration. Thank you Gene.