
Daniel W. Dobberpuhl - stmw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_W._Dobberpuhl
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tempguy9999
Another one gone? Oh heck.

The Alpha had the closest thing to beauty in an ISA I've ever seen. Reading
about the design motivations of that really made me understand the value of
understanding tradeoffs, if that makes sense. It was a work of art.

If I may also mention, I understand Henry S. Warren, author of Hacker's
Delight also died recently.

RIP, and I'd wish I'd met both of you.

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_Codemonkeyism
I love to listen to Sophie Wilson, the inventor of the ARM instruction set -
to me a real geek and hacker.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson)

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mattkevan
Love hearing about the people and stories involved with the creation of Acorn
and ARM systems. As a kid I was a big fan of Acorn computers, and still have a
soft spot now.

Back then I was really excited when the StrongARM processor came out. The
RiscPC, which used it, was significantly more powerful than any previous Acorn
and had an innovative case which you could expand by adding ‘slices’ to hold
more hardware. It also included an optional 486 processor board to run Windows
at the same time.

Remember seeing one machine that someone had expanded to over 15 slices and
included a sandwich grill.

~~~
LeoPanthera
The “rocket ship” RISC PC. The top slice was a (working!) kitchen sink.
[http://www.john-
ward.org.uk/personal/john/computers/html/roc...](http://www.john-
ward.org.uk/personal/john/computers/html/rocket.html)

~~~
mattkevan
That’s amazing! I’m so glad that someone else remembers it (and that I
remembered it fairly accurately 20-odd years later).

Saw it in an issue of Acorn User and thought it was literally the best thing
ever.

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oneplane
It looks like every time he had a nice place to work on integrated circuits
the company was bought up by a bigger company and then he left, only to be
bought yet again. Almost as if there was no escape.

~~~
pavlov
Funny, I read it the other way: he got to work on a sequence of projects based
on very architectures (VAX, Alpha, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC), lead them all to
significant success, then moved on to repeat the magic at a different company
and a different architecture.

Doesn't that sound more fun than being the "VAX microprocessor" guy forever?
(Assuming that architecture had stuck around.)

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gumby
He was a phenomenal engineer and I had not realized he’d passed away. Thanks
stmw, though it was sad news.

~~~
stmw
Yeah, I saw the news of his passing and it seemed like the right thing to
highlight. Many current semiconductor CTO's were commenting on same sadness
and his great impact.

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chasil
I have collected a few CPUs from retired systems that I keep on the upper
ledge of my IBM model M keyboard. One of those chips is a 21164.

Rest in peace, Dan Dobberphul.

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rjsw
There are 4 StrongARM systems in the room with me right now, none powered up
but they were still good machines for their time.

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greglindahl
I built supercomputers out of Alphas for 2 generations, and prototyped a
supercomputer built with SiByte's chip. Great architecture, and I was
reasonably confident that SiByte would turn out to be good given Dan's
background. RIP.

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nemonemo
Does anyone know what led him to be such a productive engineer? I would love
to hear about his design principles and his routines.

