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from Fran Underwood
Apparently, because I didn't design the full 1401 architecture at
the beginning (I, and others, failed to realize the full scope of
the market), it was necessary to continually modify the
architecture to adapt to the changing requirements.
Consequently, some of the changes were awkward.
I don't know if there is a lesson to be learned here or not.
I'm pretty sure that if we had waited for ALL market
requirements to be included in the design before release to
manufacturing, there never would have been a 1401.
from Robert Garner
No one can really be sufficiently "visionary" of customer/market requirements! But the pressure you, marketing, and management undoubtedly felt to get everyone's favorite feature in ("kitchen sinking" as we called it) must have been relentless, and I suspect, supported the adoption of microstore in the S/360. IBM's core values were/are to kept customer needs at the forefront. With microcode, certain new features could be easily added and some bugs repaired, very late in the productization process and clearly even into the field. (IBM even perfected "just-in-time", ion-beam metallization of chips for a while to allow for late chip features/bug fixes.)
But like all over indulgence, the microstore S/360's cemented the "inefficiency" foundation for RISC to emerge later (beginning with IBM's John Cocke's 801 project and new compilers in early 70's), which is the wave I rode at Sun Microsystems, as architect of SPARC. Ironically, all the early computers (before 70's) had RISC'ish, simple instruction sets, but just not enough registers, enough main memory, memory management units, etc..
I like to think of the 1401 as an "appliance" in the sense that it was explicitly designed to control a particular class of peripherals (1403, 729s, 1402, et al) at a lowest cost practicable. Such "sweet spot" machines can be very successful, as demonstrated by the 1401's success. Future enhancement models then expand on the initial success (1440, 1460 in this case).
I wonder if the S/360 perhaps went "up scale" just a tad too far, when what the market really (still) wanted was lower-cost computers? Minicomputers were that next wave, then "hobby" PC's :-), then RISCs, now hand-helds. ;-)
> I don't remember any of this stuff [the 50's memos]
Likewise, I don't recall my own emails/memos from the late 70's when I was designing the Xerox STAR 8010 professional workstation.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and stories!
- Robert
from John Pokoski
Re Fran's remembering, it is human nature I guess. I noticed that I remembered fairly well my early multiply/divide memos and didn't remember at all the process overlap memos two years later. I think that is because the early M/D stuff was my first engineering work and was really exciting to me. It probably made a deeper imprint on my memory and I may have even thought about it over the years thus providing memory refresh. Besides, I thought M/D was precise and neat. On the other hand, after a couple of years, the excitement of the 1401 and a new job dulled. And process overlap was relatively messy.
I suspect Fran had a similar situation. I can only imagine how exciting it was to be the singular architect of a new machine. Especially such a revolutionary one. I read his early design studies and was amazed at their clarity and completeness, right down to the practical sample programs he wrote and the memory partitioning. I had to do similar things in grad school in computer architecture courses and later required students to do so in courses I taught. However, there was never the amount of detail that Fran produced. Plus it was only a game while Fran's was the real thing. I imagine that after the first prototype was pretty much running, and the emphasis was more on minor modifications and production details, his excitement decreased and thus the memories were not retained. I also imagine that since he has saved his original design memos that he has looked at them since, thus providing memory refresh.
Unfortunately, Fran's response sounds almost apologetic that the machine hadn't been designed to perfection on the first whack. That's outlandish. I considered Fran a visionary, close to a genius, when I observed him fifty years ago. After reading his early design memos last week, I was even more impressed. Fifty years ago I was too green to realize the uniqueness of the editing scheme, add to memory, etc. and how this related to market needs re replacing unit record stuff. Few people can (or will) carry a project through from the high level ideas to the nitty-gritty details. Besides, there is no way that one person can know everything important to a market, and as more people saw the plans they apparently made useful suggestions.
Incidentally, I chuckled at Fran's distaste of plug boards expressed in the early memos. I recall in later days when some sort of peripheral (I forget what it was) was to be interfaced to the 1401, and Fran noticed that the perpheral used a plug board, he almost became apoplectic. It would contaminate the system!
John
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