Skip to main content

Articles

Computer architect Gene Amdahl — chief designer of the IBM System/360 and founder of Amdahl Corporation.

November 14, 2015

Amdahl Recollection

By Frederic Withington

On 11/13/2015 the NY Times printed the obituary of Gene Amdahl, which prompted this recollection of him. His revolutionary attack on IBM with plug-compatible high-end computers  occurred at the time I was most involved in industry forecasting for AD Little. One result was a consulting assignment...

Punched paper tape, an early way of entering programs.

February 24, 2014

A Billion Programmers

By Frederic Withington

When I first wrote programs in 1953, there was no software and few programmers. I entered programs in the computer’s binary language (octal notation) directly into the machine’s registers. And the machine was all mine: there was no operating system to allocate its resources among multiple programs...