
Oral History of Bob Barton and the Burroughs B5000 team (1985) - gruseom
https://web.archive.org/web/20110807012251/http://special.lib.umn.edu/cbi/oh/pdf.phtml?id=21
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spitfire
The B5K architecture is the prototype for what modern systems aught to be
like. If I ever strike it rich, my next business would likely be reviving the
B5K for enterprise. Think TCO, enhancements to support dynamic languages, etc.
Oh, and I'd use pascal style strings (32bit length field minimum).

The idea of an instruction set designed for the application is enlightened.
Obvious yes, but not obvious enough for people to follow through with it.

EDIT: Also, this and the Carmack keynote in one day makes HN worth all the
noise. This is what I came here for.

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gruseom
Follow-up to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855500>.

~~~
acqq
Also see

The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth)

Knuth coded the whole Algol compiler in three months, on a computer on which
other programmers and a payroll processing had higher priority and received
for that money that a top programmer earned for a year at that time:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567>

~~~
gruseom
Wow. Thanks.

Reading further in the conference transcript I noticed one other major figure
who makes an appearance: Ken Iverson. Here's what Barton says:

 _There are lots of funny might have beens in connection with this. You didn't
ask the question, why didn't the machine have index registers? [...] Well, I
think that what happened really was something like this. We had Iverson as a
consultant and I think Duncan MacDonald must have had a lot to do with
arranging that. He was a consultant in engineering at the time, but that time
when I was a Burroughs employee, I was asked to contribute some money from my
budget. I agreed to doing that, and I remember going to a series of talks by
Iverson, and my reaction was, "Wow!" He was still at Harvard at the time; he
had an unpolished system (it was many years before the book was published),
but I sat in that lecture thinking you can do the kind of things he's talking
about in a machine with very little more hardware than it takes for three
index registers. I used to argue against index registers on the grounds that
ALGOL indexing was more general, but in the back of my mind I was hoping that
the machine could have vector operations. I wasn't very good at convincing
anybody of that; in fact, I failed again with the 6700 program. I failed. One
of the customers convinced Burroughs to do a retrofit on vector operations at
that time -- I don't think a very good job, either. But that's a perception I
have that has nothing to do with the record. I bet Paul cannot produce a
single item that will show that there was ever a suggestion that vector
operations be built into the machine. Am I right?_

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rednaught
This is a real gem. I've been thankful to have a great career in computers the
last 20 years and everyday I'm reminded how little I actually know about our
history. We really do stand on the shoulders(and success) of giants.

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dang
Url changed from
[http://special.lib.umn.edu/cbi/oh/pdf.phtml?id=21](http://special.lib.umn.edu/cbi/oh/pdf.phtml?id=21),
which no longer works.

