4 ms·

A few years ago I dedicated a couple of days to finding any evidence of documentation for the 801 beyond a small number of well known academic papers, but found

A few years ago I dedicated a couple of days to finding any evidence of documentation for the 801 beyond a small number of well known academic papers, but found none. It really bothers me, probably to an unreasonable degree, how common it is for corporations to neglect such an easy win. IBM is really bad about it, especially considering how long of a history they have - just look at how anemic their public facing corporate archives page is. Yes, they had a long running tradition of publishing very low level papers in publicly accessible journals, a huge number of very important papers... but when they killed off their internal journals that served as the fountain head for the effort - their chosen steward quickly locked it all behind a paywall. Young engineers WANT to revere their elders while bringing forward the state of the art, and there have been some good efforts made in the collection of narratives, but engineers need work product (not English lit) in order to do the ancients justice. There aren't enough articles like this, so my thanks to the author - well done... but his job could easily be made so much less difficult by corporations taking advantage of something with such a long tail of public good will: preserving and then releasing obsolete work product.

kragen 4y ago
From IBM management's point of view, I think, the easy win was that even though they discovered RISC in 01974 and shipped it in ROMP in 01981, their competition didn't ship RISC until 01985, in the form of the janky MIPS R2000; ARM 2 and Fujitsu's SPARC MB86900 didn't ship until 01986. Frank T. Cary and John R. Opel, who led IBM at the time, couldn't care less who young engineers in 02022 revere. Not only are they both dead, but also even at the time their objective was making a lot of money, not fostering engineering excellence, or garnering admiration for their minions.
- sennight 4y ago
  I won't pretend to have enough familiarity with the goings on in long past IBM management to be able to state with any authority what they may or may not have thought, but I'd be surprised if your single-minded characterization was close to accurate. If you read through the very long list of IBM published papers - you'll see that a lot of them covered novel solutions to real problems of the day that IBM was selling solutions for, in enough detail to save potential competitors a lot of time. That is a calculated risk that they've made for a long time (until pretty recently). It isn't difficult making the business case for what I've proposed... rumor has it that even Intel has recognized how badly they screwed themselves over by treating senior engineers as poorly as they did in the late 90s. The whole imperative to recruit motivated talent isn't a new thing that started with Google's masseuses and sous-chefs, R&D heavy industries have been mindful of the advertising value in publishing for a long time.
  - kragen 4y ago
    Oh, I absolutely believe that IBM researchers wanted to share their findings, and that IBM's management was to some extent willing to tolerate them doing so. But I don't think IBM's management (post-Watson at least) saw that as a benefit of having researchers, but rather a necessary cost, one they successfully curtailed during the 01970s. And I don't think IBM's management cared one way or the other what engineers outside IBM thought of it. But none of them were my personal friends, so I might be inferring wrongly from their behavior. Their behavior was pretty egregious, though!
epc 4y ago
Much of IBM’s internal informal history was lost in the transition from the RSCS based TOOLSRUN forums to a mix of Lotus Notes/Domino/web forums around 1999–2000 (note that this was a business choice, all internal fora were already available via nntp). IBM Research might have additional documentation on the 801 and related products but it looks like you’d have to contact their research library directly, nothing on line.
- sennight 4y ago
  I wouldn't even dare to dream for version controlled source... I was over the moon when roughly dated personal backups of research edition Unix started popping up. From what I've seen in IBM documentation and a small number of code leaks - it would actually be very difficult to faithfully present their historical code simply due to the Rube Goldberg SCM they've employed. It was so wild that it permeated into their xcoff executable format.
  - epc 4y ago
    Depends on the product lab. The o/s I worked on had some form of SCM dating to the 1970s (CLEAR). The thing is most of the source code from the 1960s and even 1970s would have been punch cards, shifting to tape in the 70s. There's probably landfills near Austin, Rochester, and Westchester county that have punch cards and tape libraries since I doubt IBM held onto them. At some point IBM shifted from the belief that maintaining history was important to the business to believing anything older than 90 days was too dangerous (from a litigation perspective) to hold onto.

kragen 4y ago

From IBM management's point of view, I think, the easy win was that even though they discovered RISC in 01974 and shipped it in ROMP in 01981, their competition didn't ship RISC until 01985, in the form of the janky MIPS R2000; ARM 2 and Fujitsu's SPARC MB86900 didn't ship until 01986. Frank T. Cary and John R. Opel, who led IBM at the time, couldn't care less who young engineers in 02022 revere. Not only are they both dead, but also even at the time their objective was making a lot of money, not fostering engineering excellence, or garnering admiration for their minions.

sennight 4y ago
I won't pretend to have enough familiarity with the goings on in long past IBM management to be able to state with any authority what they may or may not have thought, but I'd be surprised if your single-minded characterization was close to accurate. If you read through the very long list of IBM published papers - you'll see that a lot of them covered novel solutions to real problems of the day that IBM was selling solutions for, in enough detail to save potential competitors a lot of time. That is a calculated risk that they've made for a long time (until pretty recently). It isn't difficult making the business case for what I've proposed... rumor has it that even Intel has recognized how badly they screwed themselves over by treating senior engineers as poorly as they did in the late 90s. The whole imperative to recruit motivated talent isn't a new thing that started with Google's masseuses and sous-chefs, R&D heavy industries have been mindful of the advertising value in publishing for a long time.
- kragen 4y ago
  Oh, I absolutely believe that IBM researchers wanted to share their findings, and that IBM's management was to some extent willing to tolerate them doing so. But I don't think IBM's management (post-Watson at least) saw that as a benefit of having researchers, but rather a necessary cost, one they successfully curtailed during the 01970s. And I don't think IBM's management cared one way or the other what engineers outside IBM thought of it. But none of them were my personal friends, so I might be inferring wrongly from their behavior. Their behavior was pretty egregious, though!

epc 4y ago

Much of IBM’s internal informal history was lost in the transition from the RSCS based TOOLSRUN forums to a mix of Lotus Notes/Domino/web forums around 1999–2000 (note that this was a business choice, all internal fora were already available via nntp). IBM Research might have additional documentation on the 801 and related products but it looks like you’d have to contact their research library directly, nothing on line.

sennight 4y ago
I wouldn't even dare to dream for version controlled source... I was over the moon when roughly dated personal backups of research edition Unix started popping up. From what I've seen in IBM documentation and a small number of code leaks - it would actually be very difficult to faithfully present their historical code simply due to the Rube Goldberg SCM they've employed. It was so wild that it permeated into their xcoff executable format.
- epc 4y ago
  Depends on the product lab. The o/s I worked on had some form of SCM dating to the 1970s (CLEAR). The thing is most of the source code from the 1960s and even 1970s would have been punch cards, shifting to tape in the 70s. There's probably landfills near Austin, Rochester, and Westchester county that have punch cards and tape libraries since I doubt IBM held onto them. At some point IBM shifted from the belief that maintaining history was important to the business to believing anything older than 90 days was too dangerous (from a litigation perspective) to hold onto.