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Nick Tredennick is mentioned in the article. I read a book he wrote about his experience in the design of the IBM 370 on a chip. The lore was that it was a 6800
by tasty_freeze 2y ago
Nick Tredennick is mentioned in the article. I read a book he wrote about his experience in the design of the IBM 370 on a chip. The lore was that it was a 68000 with different microcode, but the book makes it clear that it was a new harddware design, but incorporated a lot of the approach used when making the 68000.
Tredennick was a funny guy and so it kept the book lively, at least as compared to what one might expect from such a book. It talked about both the way the microcode was developed (he had a 5"x7" card for each 360 instruction and it contained his latest version of microcode for that instruction) and how writing the microcode was intertwined with the hardware design. For example, some particular instruction had awkward microcode, so he'd change the underlying hardware to do a little bit of special case logic for that on instruction.
In the back half was an idiosyncratic glossary of terms. I no longer have the book, but one I recall was along these lines: "Methodology: a pompous way to say method."
- ForOldHack 2y agoMentioned? He was a designer on the 68000, the system 370, and the micro system/370, which (gasp) used 68000 chips. ( "Heavily microcode modified. Heavily.) Now, I do not know about the transition from the 370 on a chip to the XT/370. https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/motorola-intel-ibm-make-a-mainframe https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/motorola-intel-ibm-make...
- ForOldHack 2y agoHarry L. "Nick" Tredennick was an American manager, inventor, VLSI design engineer and author who was involved in the development for Motorola's MC68000 and for IBM's Micro/370 microprocessors.
- ForOldHack 2y agoThe name of the book would be useful: is it in the Internet Archive?
- rbanffy 2y agoIf IBM really made an effort to sell a desktop 370, it'd have been a magnificent machine. OTOH, MVS is such an alien OS to most desktop users most people would absolutely hate it.
- sillywalk 2y agoEDIT: oops, I didn't notice somebody already commented on this below. I don't think IBM made an effort to sell it, and I don't think it ran MVS, but they did make several 'Mainframe 370s' board sets that would fit into a PC. The boards had 68k processors on them + IBM logic chips to run 370 instructions. https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/motorola-intel-ibm-make-a-mainframe https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/motorola-intel-ibm-make... https://www.ardent-tool.com/P370/Environment.html https://www.ardent-tool.com/P370/Environment.html http://typewritten.org/Articles/IBM/g520-5087-1.pdf http://typewritten.org/Articles/IBM/g520-5087-1.pdf
- rjsw 2y ago> I read a book he wrote about his experience in the design of the IBM 370 on a chip. https://archive.org/download/tredennick-microprocessor-logic-design/Tredennick-Microprocessor-logic-Design_text.pdf https://archive.org/download/tredennick-microprocessor-logic...
- fargle 2y agothanks for this. the glossary alone is pretty funny. page 350 contains the "methodology" definition references in the grandparent comment and several more. "combinatorial logic" is cute, as is "CISC" and "chip" is epic.