4 ms·
Reminds me somewhat of the Minsk- series of indigeneously developed Soviet mainframes -- stack architecture, RISC-like ISA, far ahead of its time. Due to pressu
by strlen 13y ago
Reminds me somewhat of the Minsk- series of indigeneously developed Soviet mainframes -- stack architecture, RISC-like ISA, far ahead of its time. Due to pressure from the higher ups -- or as my parents bluntly put it, "комуняки" (the commies) -- it was abandoned in favour of reverse engineering and cloning the IBM 360 (an enormous feat of engineering) an inferior architecture (my dad called this a setback for Computer Science[1] -- not just in USSR, but in general).
Read more here: http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/minsk0.htm http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/minsk0.htm
I guess "no one got fired for choosing IBM" held true not only under capitalism, but under communism as well.
(In a "small world coincidence", I happened to work with the son of the designer of the Minsk-32 -- the most advanced machine in the series -- at Yahoo. Belarus was one Soviet Union's Silicon Valleys, and incidentally the Belarusian State University Institute's Radio Technical Institute still has an excellent EE/CS program (hint: I think you'll have a lot less competition recruiting there than at Stanford!)
[1] Personally I'm a bit skeptical of stack architectures despite their huge popularity (JVM, CLR, Forth, etc...):I understand the cachet, but (to also quote my dad...) "programs can play chess very well", i.e., register windowing is one of the most well understood and mature algorithms, let the compiler handle that job. LLVM's use of a register-based IR is a good step in that direction.
- agumonkey 13y agoFor people interested in Stack computers, Eric LaForest did a thesis on them : http://is.uwaterloo.ca/Eric_LaForest_Thesis.pdf http://is.uwaterloo.ca/Eric_LaForest_Thesis.pdf (from Hamblin RPN to Forth processors)
- strlen 13y agoThanks for sharing this! Very interesting.
- ajuc 13y agoSoviets did it quite often. Production of one of the first minicomputers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-202 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-202 designed by Poles in cooperation with British was also canceled despite being very advanced for the time.
- strlen 13y agoThat's why I'm a capitalist: if an American computer firm told their best employees "we're scraping this project you love and are building IBM 360 clone", the employees have had the option of going elsewhere. Indeed, exactly this happened many times. On the other hand, I've heard many horror stories of similar goings happening with regards to technology at NASA/JPL and other tech-heavy government agencies: a great project gets built in house, it gets scraped because it isn't "up to WS-management standards and best practices and uses customized open source and not off-the-shelf commercial software". I call this the "not-invented-elsewhere syndrome", which can be just as pernicious as the more familiar NIH. am hoping recent debacles like healthcare.gov failure will get governments to revisit the way they look at building software.