4 ms·

Follow-up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855500 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855500.

by gruseom 15y ago

acqq 15y ago
Also see The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth) Knuth coded the whole Algol compiler in three months, on a computer on which other programmers and a payroll processing had higher priority and received for that money that a top programmer earned for a year at that time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567
- gruseom 15y ago
  Wow. Thanks. Reading further in the conference transcript I noticed one other major figure who makes an appearance: Ken Iverson. Here's what Barton says: There are lots of funny might have beens in connection with this. You didn't ask the question, why didn't the machine have index registers? [...] Well, I think that what happened really was something like this. We had Iverson as a consultant and I think Duncan MacDonald must have had a lot to do with arranging that. He was a consultant in engineering at the time, but that time when I was a Burroughs employee, I was asked to contribute some money from my budget. I agreed to doing that, and I remember going to a series of talks by Iverson, and my reaction was, "Wow!" He was still at Harvard at the time; he had an unpolished system (it was many years before the book was published), but I sat in that lecture thinking you can do the kind of things he's talking about in a machine with very little more hardware than it takes for three index registers. I used to argue against index registers on the grounds that ALGOL indexing was more general, but in the back of my mind I was hoping that the machine could have vector operations. I wasn't very good at convincing anybody of that; in fact, I failed again with the 6700 program. I failed. One of the customers convinced Burroughs to do a retrofit on vector operations at that time -- I don't think a very good job, either. But that's a perception I have that has nothing to do with the record. I bet Paul cannot produce a single item that will show that there was ever a suggestion that vector operations be built into the machine. Am I right?
- akkartik 15y ago
  I'm going to remember that story next time I complain about work.

Follow-up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855500 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855500.

by gruseom 15y ago

Follow-up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855500 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855500.

acqq 15y ago

Also see The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth) Knuth coded the whole Algol compiler in three months, on a computer on which other programmers and a payroll processing had higher priority and received for that money that a top programmer earned for a year at that time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567

gruseom 15y ago
Wow. Thanks. Reading further in the conference transcript I noticed one other major figure who makes an appearance: Ken Iverson. Here's what Barton says: There are lots of funny might have beens in connection with this. You didn't ask the question, why didn't the machine have index registers? [...] Well, I think that what happened really was something like this. We had Iverson as a consultant and I think Duncan MacDonald must have had a lot to do with arranging that. He was a consultant in engineering at the time, but that time when I was a Burroughs employee, I was asked to contribute some money from my budget. I agreed to doing that, and I remember going to a series of talks by Iverson, and my reaction was, "Wow!" He was still at Harvard at the time; he had an unpolished system (it was many years before the book was published), but I sat in that lecture thinking you can do the kind of things he's talking about in a machine with very little more hardware than it takes for three index registers. I used to argue against index registers on the grounds that ALGOL indexing was more general, but in the back of my mind I was hoping that the machine could have vector operations. I wasn't very good at convincing anybody of that; in fact, I failed again with the 6700 program. I failed. One of the customers convinced Burroughs to do a retrofit on vector operations at that time -- I don't think a very good job, either. But that's a perception I have that has nothing to do with the record. I bet Paul cannot produce a single item that will show that there was ever a suggestion that vector operations be built into the machine. Am I right?
akkartik 15y ago
I'm going to remember that story next time I complain about work.