
Gene Amdahl has died - andrewbinstock
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/13/technology/gene-amdahl-pioneer-of-mainframe-computing-dies-at-92.html
======
MichaelMoser123
When an IBM salesman saw a coffee cup with the Amdahl Logo at a customers
site, he was instructed to cut one million dollar of his price offer. That was
the one million dollar coffee mug.

[http://dealwhisperers.blogspot.co.il/2015/07/a-million-
dolla...](http://dealwhisperers.blogspot.co.il/2015/07/a-million-dollar-
coffee-cup.html)

here is a picture of it [http://www.deadprogrammer.com/fud-
you](http://www.deadprogrammer.com/fud-you)

~~~
rdl
I wonder what the modern equivalents are. (Also, how to get an Amdahl mug
today)

~~~
kijiki
We at Cumulus have been told by our customers that having one of our rocket-
turtle stickers on their laptop results in a much faster and easier
negotiations about discounts with their Cisco sales rep. An Arista sticker
probably works too.

It is one of the reasons we made the stickers. =)

------
jusben1369
"In 1946 he married Marian Quissell, who grew up on a farm four miles from
his.

He received his bachelor’s degree in 1948 from South Dakota State University,
in Brookings, where his wife worked as a secretary. She had dropped out of
Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D., after her freshman year to go to work
to help pay for her husband’s education."

\- What a nice story of love, sacrifice and reward given they appeared to have
stayed together till the end.

~~~
frossie
Unless you personally know either of the people involved, I don't think you
are in a position to make a judgement as to whether it was "love, sacrifice
and reward" or "prevailing cultural pressures at the time that were always
regretted later"

~~~
ciupicri
I thought that the prevailing cultural pressures at the time were about men
working and women staying at home.

~~~
ScottBurson
Well, the thrust of it was that the man's career is important, and the woman's
isn't. So assuming they had no children at the time, it was entirely
consistent with that for her to quit college and take a job with no career
path in order to fund his education. (If they had children, of course, the
ethic would have been that she should stay home to care for them... indeed,
she would likely have had no alternative.)

I think frossie has a good point, actually. We can hope that it was as
jusben1369 suggests, but we can't really know that. Maybe being married to
Gene gave Marian all she wanted in life, and maybe it didn't.

------
jgrahamc
Died? I'm pretty sure he's just been swapped into a context that we don't have
access to and is running in parallel with us.

RIP

~~~
rbanffy
I have faith we'll eventually be able to restore all those important
processes. It's really hard to destroy information. We just need a way to read
it back.

~~~
nkoren
Is that you, Nikolai?
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov))

;-)

~~~
rbanffy
I do not perceive myself to be Nikolai, but I do not trust my memories enough
to claim I could not possibly be him, provided someone had the needed
technologies to interfere with this timeline and my memories of it.

------
LandoCalrissian
“By sheer intellectual force, plus some argument and banging on the table, he
maintained architectural consistency across six engineering teams,” said
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

This is one of the more impressive things to me. Keeping that many people on
the same page is an amazing feat.

~~~
cafard
Brooks's interview at the Computer History Museum mentions an argument over
byte size: "Gene and I each quit once that week, quit the company, and Manny
Piore got us back together."
([http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/11/102658255-05-01-acc.pdf))

------
Animats
I met Gene Amdahl once, when I took a summer course in computer architecture
at UCSC. We got a tour of the Amdahl plant. They had a huge prototype CPU
built out of TTL, which they built before making custom ICs. Each board in the
prototype became one IC. Each row of cards in the prototype became one board.
Each rack became one row of cards. That was how you debugged hardware designs
in 1975.

~~~
signa11
> That was how you debugged hardware designs in 1975.

soul of a new machine, spends couple of chapters discussing debugging the
data-general machine as well. pretty interesting...

~~~
chiph
If anyone new to the industry (software or hardware) hasn't read this yet --
you really really should. We had an MV-8000 at college and it performed quite
well, considering the loads we threw at it (I recall it running ADA, COBOL,
and Pascal compilers all at the same time)

[http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-
Kidder/dp/03164...](http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-
Kidder/dp/0316491977)

------
nns
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt)

FUD was first defined with its specific current meaning by Gene Amdahl the
same year, 1975, after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp.:
"FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the
minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products."[

------
krylon
Gene Amdahl was remarkable person, both as an engineer and an entrepeneur.

The Computer History Museum has a very interesting interview with Gene Amdahl
as part of its Oral History Collection -
[http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102702492](http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102702492)
\- that is, quite frankly, more interesting than anything I could come up with
right now.

~~~
cooper12
The oral history is quite interesting and in depth. It really helps to get to
know him. Thank you for sharing.

------
jmspring
Honest question for those who got received CS/Engineering degrees in the last
10 years, did Amdahl's Law come up?

I've seen programming courses go away from assembler/c/c++ over the years to
Java and then scripting languages at a couple local schools.

I wonder if the history/theory side changed as well.

~~~
bricestacey
CS degree. Never heard of it. I graduated about 5 years ago.

~~~
jmspring
Thanks. It's always interesting to see what people with comparable degrees
encounter.

------
protomyth
At university, we used an IBM 370 for most of our programming classes. The 370
assembler was interesting to program on after learning 6502 assembler in high
school and using 6809 for an EE class. I still have my banana book.

Flandreau, S.D. is also the home of an indian boarding school. Its not exactly
a big town even by local standards.

[edit] love the quote “He’s always been right up there with Seymour Cray or
Steve Wozniak,”

We lost Cray too early (f'n drunk driver) much like Jay Miner. I guess I
should be grateful that unlike a lot of other professions, we walk the earth
at the same time as our legends.

------
redroo
The purpose of Amdahl's 1967 paper was to dissuade customers that
multiprocessors were cost-effective (read: more expensive for him to produce
at Amdahl Corp). In a certain sense, he was correct. Ironically, however, that
same paper is now the most quoted in the parallel processing literature.
Moreover, he never wrote down the "law" that is now attributed to him---a
marketing coup.

~~~
jdale27
_Moreover, he never wrote down the "law" that is now attributed to him---a
marketing coup._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy)
strikes again.

~~~
nhaehnle
Stigler's law - that is, the fact that eponyms often deny credit for an
invention to many people who were relevant for it - is one of the reasons why
I try to avoid eponymy where possible.

The other reason is that eponymy is often a symptom of laziness. Rather than
finding a good, descriptive name for something, you end up with an eponym that
is not at all evocative of the meaning behind it. For example, and without
putting too much thought into it, Amdahl's law could have been called
something like law of scaling or law of bottlenecks.

~~~
privong
> The other reason is that eponymy is often a symptom of laziness. Rather than
> finding a good, descriptive name for something, you end up with an eponym
> that is not at all evocative of the meaning behind it.

The tongue-in-cheek flip side of this coin is that, when discovering
something, one should give it a descriptive but complex name. That way, people
are more likely to refer to it by the names of the discoverers than by the
clumsy descriptive title the discoverers chose. :)

------
edw519
Most people don't grok that

(IBM).1960s+1970s = (Apple+Microsoft+Google+Dell+OpenSource).today

for many reasons, but mostly because of the 360 Series, upon which I and many
my age got started.

I don't miss the COBOL ENVIRONMENT DIVISION or the punch cards much, but I do
miss the technical brilliance which captured the industry.

RIP Sweet Genius

------
mbreese
For those who may not have heard of him:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law)

------
gepoch
Amdahl's law is such a powerful idea. I use it to prioritize development items
every week if not every day.

Always sad to see a story like this on hacker news. I'll be talking about his
ideas for the rest of my career, guaranteed.

------
hkmurakami
> _With funding from Fujitsu, he formed the Amdahl Corporation, setting up
> offices in Sunnyvale, Calif._

I didn't realize that the tradition of "avoid SV VC and get funding for cheap
from an overseas operating company" went so far back.

~~~
monocasa
It also ruined the company. They spent a lot of money on a potential merger
with StorageTek, only for it to go down the drain when Fujitsu claimed that
it's legal right to a percentage on products sold would be applicable to the
complete combined company as well (source: I work with a bunch of ex
StorageTek guys).

------
circlecrimson
We really need to rid the world of Alzheimer as soon as possible. The
bittersweet thing is that today's golden era titans of innovation may not live
long enough for these anti-aging treatments to be deployed.

~~~
avmich
I highly suspect those titans of innovations - in many areas - just happen to
be among the first to get to relatively low hanging fruits in a new area...
This pattern repeats in many fields.

Not to diminish Amdahl's achievements, of course.

~~~
mike_hearn
Sure. I mean, I expect to read similar obituaries one day for the computer
science giants of today, like Jeff Dean (hopefully not for a very long time!).

Amdahl's bio makes it sound like he was an effective engineer and good at
business too, but that his career was somewhat empty of success after he left
Amdahl. That should not detract from his earlier achievements. Very few people
have an unbroken track record of sustained success across their whole career.

------
orionblastar
He really invented a lot of good mainframe technology. Worked at IBM and then
left to make his own company to compete with IBM making IBM Mainframe clones
that ran faster and cost less than an IBM Mainframe.

I grew up in the era that used IBM 360/370 mainframes and I learned them in
college for FORTRAN and COBOL and JCL with DOS/VSE. I don't think colleges
teach mainframe technology anymore now that PCs have taken over.

Things moved from PCs to mobile devices so quick as well.

Edit;Typo

------
tempodox
I wonder if there will ever be some kind of statue or memorial for one of
those founding parents. Ada Lovelace, Alonzo Church, Grace Hopper, John
McCarthy, Haskell Curry, Seymour Cray, Gene Amdahl... I'm sure that list is
too short.

~~~
acheron
There's a small memorial for Grace Hopper in Arlington:
[http://parks.arlingtonva.us/locations/grace-murray-hopper-
pa...](http://parks.arlingtonva.us/locations/grace-murray-hopper-park/)

------
acqq
> Amdahl also benefited from antitrust settlements between IBM and the Justice
> Department, which required IBM to make its mainframe software available to
> competitors.

Anybody here who knows more about this? Did IBM have to sell the software for
the same price, did they have to give it for free?

~~~
simonh
It meant that Amdahl's (and other manufacturer's) customers could buy IBM
software and run it on non-IBM hardware.

~~~
acqq
I still don't know the answer:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1969:_Antitrust...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1969:_Antitrust.2C_the_Unbundling_of_software_and_services)

"After the unbundling, IBM software was divided into two main categories:
System Control Programming (SCP), which remained free to customers, and
Program Products (PP), which were charged for."

So what were Amdahl's customers able to get? Didn't they get System Control
Software from IBM (1)? Was it free for them?

1) I've found the Computerworld 1 Nov 1976 article mentioning IBM's MVT 21.8
running on Amdahl's 470.

~~~
simonh
SCP remained bundled with the hardware, so you only got it if you bought the
hardware, but if you bought the software it belonged to you so you could run
it on whatever hardware you liked. I suppose if you bought both an IBM and a
non-IBM mainframe you could take the SCP from IBM and run it on a non-IBM box,
but I'm not sure if that was addressed in the ruling. The point was to
decouple software sales from hardware sales when it came to commercial (sold)
software.

------
jhallenworld
I wonder if it's worth it for someone else to try to make a mainframe clone. I
remember some company selling the Hercules emulator on an HP IA64 machine- PSI
I think.

It would be fun to try to make an FPGA version.

Oh yeah, PSI:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/02/ibm_buys_psi/](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/02/ibm_buys_psi/)

------
oldpond
Fond memories. I was working for a financial services company when we went
from an IBM mainframe complex to an Amdahl one. Besides being responsible for
data center automation I was facilities manager, so I was in charge of the
project. It only took 3 weeks to complete the entire migration. Thank you
Gene.

------
dang
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10555794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10555794).

------
rbanffy
One minute of zeroes.

------
techdragon
I think he deserves a HN Back Bar tribute.

~~~
Intermernet
It would seem that HN agree. Black bar is now up.

~~~
vive-la-liberte
The black bar looks strange on my tablet, not like I remember it from last
time. The black is now about 1/7th of the bar and the remainder is orange. I
seem to recall that the entire bar was black last time they did it, which I
think worked much better.

~~~
dang
Pretty sure it hasn't changed.

~~~
jaredsohn
Some evidence it hasn't changed (as far as I can see):
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/turoczy/5886505173](https://www.flickr.com/photos/turoczy/5886505173)

