On Sat, 20 Jan 2024 19:50:30 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

> DEC never really understood what business they were in.

They were a company running by engineers, selling to engineers and others
who understood technical stuff. That was a great business model from the
introduction of the PDP-1 in 1959 up to the coming of RISC and the IBM PC,
mid-1980s. That was a pretty good run, until you have to start to think
about remaking yourself. Which they had trouble doing.

Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> schrieb:

> Being younger observer from the outside, my impression is that in the
> 1st World people stopped using S/360 descendents for "heavy" scientific
> calculations around 1980.

I certainly used a /360 descendants (Siemens 7881, then IBM
3090) for scientific work, but the latter was also often used
as the front end for the (also S/360 compatible) Fujitsu VP.
Hmm... looking around a bit, the IBM 3090 I worked on had 150
MFlops with its vector facility. That was not too bad when it
was purchased in 1989, but the worksations purchased soon after
eclipsed it in computing power for the individual user, and the
vector computers (Fujitsu VP in Karlsruhe) also did so. The IBM
3090 was used mainly as a front end to the VP.

On Fri, 19 Jan 2024 16:17:32 -1000
Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> wrote:

> EricP <ThatWouldBeTelling@thevillage.com> writes:
> > For single precision the 780 is slightly faster for "coded BLAS"
> > and the 158 is about 50% faster for compiled code.
>
> trivia: jan1979, I was asked to run cdc6600 rain benchmark on
> (engineering) 4341 (before shipping to customers, the engineering 4341
> was clocked about 10% slower than what shipped to customers) for
> national lab that was looking at getting 70 for a compute farm (sort
> of the leading edge of the coming cluster supercomputing tsunami). I
> also ran it on 158-3 and 3031. A 370/158 ran both the 370 microcode
> and the integrated channel microcode; a 3031 was two 158 engines, one
> with just the 370 microcode and a 2nd with just the integrated
> channel microcode.
>
> cdc6600: 35.77secs
> 158: 45.64secs
> 3031: 37.03secs
> 4341: 36.21secs
>
> ... 158 integrated channel microcode was using lots of processing
> cycles, even when no i/o was going on.
>

Did I read it right? Brand new mid-range IBM mainframe barely matched
15 y.o. CDC machine that was 10 years out of production ?
That sounds quite embarrassing.

On Sat, 20 Jan 2024 21:33:11 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

> On Sat, 20 Jan 2024 16:25 +0000 (GMT Standard Time), John Dallman
> wrote:
>
> > In article <2024Jan20.101000@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
> > anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) wrote:
> >
> > ... Dave Cutler probably doesn't move to Microsoft, and then
> > Windows NT doesn't happen, at least not in the same way.
>
> Imagine if it hadn’t been created by a Unix-hater. But then,
> Microsoft had already divested themselves of Xenix by then, hadn’t
> they? So they probably didn’t have anyone left who understood the
> value of Unix.

I see nothing wrong in DC being Unix hater.
Much much worse that he didn't understand that it is not 1970s any more
and that in 1990s plug&play support is necessity, including "hot"
plug&play.
Because of that blind spot, Win9x line, created by people that did
understand the value of plug&play (Brad Silverberg ? I can't find much
info about lead 9x architects on the Net), but very problematic
otherwise, lasted for much longer than it should have been.

John Dallman wrote:
> In article <2024Jan20.101000@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
> anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) wrote:
>
>> jgd@cix.co.uk (John Dallman) writes:
>>> The timeline doesn't work. DEC decided to adopt MIPS in 1989,
>>> because they were loosing market share worryingly quickly.
>>> NVAX was released in 1991, and they'd have had real trouble
>>> developing it without the cash from MIPS-based systems.
>> I forgot that in this alternative reality DEC would have killed the
>> VAX 9000 project early, leaving them lots of cash for developping
>> NVAX. Still, it could easily have been that they would have lost
>> customers to the RISC competition until they finally managed to do
>> the OoO-VAX.
>>
>> For developing an OoO-VAX the relevant time is 1985-1995 (HPS wrote
>> their papers on OoO (with VAX as example) starting in 1985, the
>> Pentium Pro appeared in 1995). Of course, for OoO-VAXes to succeed
>> in the market, the relevant timespan was 1995-2005. Intel dropped
>> the 64-bit IA-32 successor ball and AMD picked it up with the 2003
>> releases of Opteron and Athlon64.
>
> This requires DEC to take notice of those papers and start developing OoO
> quite quickly. They did not do that historically, and they seem to have
> been confident that their way of working would carry on being effective,
> until RISC demonstrated otherwise. This is the timeframe where IBM gave
> up on building mainframes with competitive compute power, and settled for
> them being capable data-movers.
>
> If DEC go OoO and build an OoO Micro-VAX CPU by about 1988, they can get
> somewhere. The MicroVAX 78032 of 1985 was 125K transistors; the 80386 was
> 275K transistors the same year, the 40486 was 1.2M transistors in 1989,
> so the transistor budget could be there.

There was also the CVAX in 1986, 134,000 transistors (out of 180,000 sites),
2um CMOS, 3 layers interconnect, 90 ns clock, internal 1 kB 2-way ass. cache.
Separate FPU coprocessor chip 65,000 transistors.

But these were only available in systems like 6240, quad SMP processors,
256 kB L2 cache, up to 256 MB main memory, and up to 6 high speed IO buses,
in multiple cabinets.

Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> writes:
>On Fri, 19 Jan 2024 16:17:32 -1000
>Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> wrote:
>> cdc6600: 35.77secs
>> 158: 45.64secs
>> 3031: 37.03secs
>> 4341: 36.21secs
....
>Did I read it right? Brand new mid-range IBM mainframe barely matched
>15 y.o. CDC machine that was 10 years out of production ?
>That sounds quite embarrassing.

That depends on the price, and there are also properties like size,
power consumption and cooling requirements. IBM mainframes were not
designed for HPC (with a few exceptions); if you wanted that, you
would have bought a Cray-1 in 1979 when the 4341 appeared.

There is also the thing about IBM's market: Amdahl said about the
(high-performance) ACS-360
<https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/acs_end.html>:

|Yes, but the company decided not to build it because it would have
|destroyed the pricing structures. In the first place, it would have
|forced them to make higher-end machines. But with IBM's pricing
|structure, the market disappeared by the time performance got to a
|certain level. Any machine above that in performance or price could
|only lose money.

The ACS-360 was cancelled for that reason.

Also, remember that these were not the 1990s with their extreme
advances every year; instead, the performance advances were quite a
bit slower, just like we have seen in the last two decades. And if
you compare a 2023-vintage Rock 5B (with Cortex-A76 like the Raspi5)
with a 2008-vintage Core 2 Duo E8400 PC, the Rock 5B is slightly
slower when running LaTeX, but its also much cheaper, smaller,
consumes much less power and actually works without a cooler (but we
provided one nonetheless; the Raspi 5 SoC is made in a less advanced
process and needs more cooling).

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>

Michael S wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Jan 2024 16:17:32 -1000
> Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> wrote:

>> EricP <ThatWouldBeTelling@thevillage.com> writes:
>> > For single precision the 780 is slightly faster for "coded BLAS"
>> > and the 158 is about 50% faster for compiled code.
>>
>> trivia: jan1979, I was asked to run cdc6600 rain benchmark on
>> (engineering) 4341 (before shipping to customers, the engineering 4341
>> was clocked about 10% slower than what shipped to customers) for
>> national lab that was looking at getting 70 for a compute farm (sort
>> of the leading edge of the coming cluster supercomputing tsunami). I
>> also ran it on 158-3 and 3031. A 370/158 ran both the 370 microcode
>> and the integrated channel microcode; a 3031 was two 158 engines, one
>> with just the 370 microcode and a 2nd with just the integrated
>> channel microcode.
>>
>> cdc6600: 35.77secs
>> 158: 45.64secs
>> 3031: 37.03secs
>> 4341: 36.21secs
>>
>> ... 158 integrated channel microcode was using lots of processing
>> cycles, even when no i/o was going on.
>>

> Did I read it right? Brand new mid-range IBM mainframe barely matched
> 15 y.o. CDC machine that was 10 years out of production ?
> That sounds quite embarrassing.

Target market for 4341 was not scientific computing, either.

On Sun, 21 Jan 2024 15:06:43 +0200, Michael S wrote:

> Did I read it right? Brand new mid-range IBM mainframe barely matched 15
> y.o. CDC machine that was 10 years out of production ?
> That sounds quite embarrassing.

A minute’s silence for the hardware legend that was Seymour Cray.

And a minute’s jeering at IBM’s FUD campaign to try to put CDC out of
business.

On Sun, 21 Jan 2024 15:19:22 +0200, Michael S wrote:

> On Sat, 20 Jan 2024 21:33:11 -0000 (UTC)
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 20 Jan 2024 16:25 +0000 (GMT Standard Time), John Dallman
>> wrote:
>>
>> > In article <2024Jan20.101000@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
>> > anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) wrote:
>> >
>> > ... Dave Cutler probably doesn't move to Microsoft, and then Windows
>> > NT doesn't happen, at least not in the same way.
>>
>> Imagine if it hadn’t been created by a Unix-hater. But then, Microsoft
>> had already divested themselves of Xenix by then, hadn’t they? So they
>> probably didn’t have anyone left who understood the value of Unix.
>
> I see nothing wrong in DC being Unix hater.

WSL might not have been necessary. Microsoft would not now be struggling
to offer some semblance of Linux compatibility.

MitchAlsup1 <mitchalsup@aol.com> schrieb:
> Michael S wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 19 Jan 2024 16:17:32 -1000
>> Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> wrote:
>
>>> EricP <ThatWouldBeTelling@thevillage.com> writes:
>>> > For single precision the 780 is slightly faster for "coded BLAS"
>>> > and the 158 is about 50% faster for compiled code.
>>>
>>> trivia: jan1979, I was asked to run cdc6600 rain benchmark on
>>> (engineering) 4341 (before shipping to customers, the engineering 4341
>>> was clocked about 10% slower than what shipped to customers) for
>>> national lab that was looking at getting 70 for a compute farm (sort
>>> of the leading edge of the coming cluster supercomputing tsunami). I
>>> also ran it on 158-3 and 3031. A 370/158 ran both the 370 microcode
>>> and the integrated channel microcode; a 3031 was two 158 engines, one
>>> with just the 370 microcode and a 2nd with just the integrated
>>> channel microcode.
>>>
>>> cdc6600: 35.77secs
>>> 158: 45.64secs
>>> 3031: 37.03secs
>>> 4341: 36.21secs
>>>
>>> ... 158 integrated channel microcode was using lots of processing
>>> cycles, even when no i/o was going on.
>>>
>
>> Did I read it right? Brand new mid-range IBM mainframe barely matched
>> 15 y.o. CDC machine that was 10 years out of production ?
>> That sounds quite embarrassing.
>
>
> Target market for 4341 was not scientific computing, either.

And yet, people used IBM mainframes for scientific computing...

For example, the IBM 4361 had, as an optional feature, the maximum
precision scalar product developed by the University of Karlsruhe.

Not sure why they went to IBM with it, maybe DEC would have been
a better choice. Then again, the people at the computer center
in Karlsruhe were very mainframe-oriented...

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
>On Sun, 21 Jan 2024 15:06:43 +0200, Michael S wrote:
>
>> Did I read it right? Brand new mid-range IBM mainframe barely matched 15
>> y.o. CDC machine that was 10 years out of production ?
>> That sounds quite embarrassing.
>
>A minute’s silence for the hardware legend that was Seymour Cray.

He was a friend of my Godfather (who lived in Chippewa Falls), right around
the time I first had access to a computer (1974, B5500). I didn't
realize who he was until much later, however and never had a chance to
discuss computers.

On Sun, 21 Jan 2024 21:51:56 -0000 (UTC), Thomas Koenig wrote:

> Not sure why they went to IBM with it, maybe DEC would have been a
> better choice. Then again, the people at the computer center in
> Karlsruhe were very mainframe-oriented...

There seemed to be a lot of people like that, who only knew IBM and saw
the whole world through IBM lenses. To the rest of us, IBM’s way of doing
things just seemed overcomplicated, unwieldy, inflexible ... and
expensive.

Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> writes:
> Did I read it right? Brand new mid-range IBM mainframe barely matched
> 15 y.o. CDC machine that was 10 years out of production ?
> That sounds quite embarrassing.

national lab was looking at getting 70 because of price/performance
.... sort of the leading edge of the coming cluster scale-up
supercomputing tsunami.

decade later had project originally HA/6000 for NYTimes to move their
newspaper system (ATEX) off (DEC) VaxCluster to RS/6000. I rename it
HA/CMP when I start doing technical/scientific cluster scale-up with
national labs and commercial cluster scale-up with RDBMS vendors
(Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Ingres). Early Jan1992, meeting with Oracle
CEO, who is told 16-way cluster mid-92 and 128-way cluster
ye-92. However, end of Jan1992, cluster scaleup is transferred for
announce as IBM supercomputer (for technical/scientific *ONLY*, possibly
because of commercial cluster scaleup "threat") and we are told we
couldn't work on anything with more than four processors (we leave IBM a
few months later). A couple weeks later, IBM (cluster) supercomputer
group in the press (pg8)
https://archive.org/details/sim_computerworld_1992-02-17_26_7

First half 80s, IBM 4300s sold into the same mid-range market as VAX and
in about the same numbers for single and small unit orders ... big
difference was large companies ordering hundreds of 4300s at a time for
placing out in departmental areas (sort of the leading edge of the
coming distributed comuting tsunami).

old archived post with vax sales, sliced and diced by model, year,
us/non-us
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0

2nd half of 80s, mid-range market was moving to workstation and large PC
servers ... affecting both VAX and 4300s

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>:
>On Sun, 21 Jan 2024 21:51:56 -0000 (UTC), Thomas Koenig wrote:
>
>> Not sure why they went to IBM with it, maybe DEC would have been a
>> better choice. Then again, the people at the computer center in
>> Karlsruhe were very mainframe-oriented...
>
>There seemed to be a lot of people like that, who only knew IBM and saw
>the whole world through IBM lenses. ...

IBM has a big development lab in Boeblingen which is about an hour from Karlsruhe.

At that time DEC had no labs outside the United States.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

On Mon, 22 Jan 2024 02:46:05 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

> IBM has a big development lab in Boeblingen which is about an hour from
> Karlsruhe.

At one time, IBM were the world’s biggest holder of patents. Their
researchers came up with many clever ideas. But my impression was, very
few of those ideas actually made it into their products.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Jan 2024 02:46:05 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:
>
>> IBM has a big development lab in Boeblingen which is about an hour from
>> Karlsruhe.
>
> At one time, IBM were the world’s biggest holder of patents. Their
> researchers came up with many clever ideas. But my impression was, very
> few of those ideas actually made it into their products.
>
My uni lecturer had a favorite:

IBM's patent for a zero-time sorting chip.

It was basically a DMA-style memory device that was setup as a big
ladder of comparators so that it could do a parallel bubble sort:

As each new item arrived it would be compared with the current top, and
the loser would be pushed down to the next ladder level, replacing the
time which had at the same time lost the comparison at that level.

By the time all items had been loaded, the top would be the overall
winner, right?

You would then reverse the direction, while keeping the comparators
active, so now you would stream out perfectly sorted items.

The real problem is of course that this is effectively very expensive
memory, and as soon as you ran out of space in the chip you would have
to fall back on multi-way merge between separate runs of chip-size chunks.

In pretty much every conceivable real-world situation you would much
rather have 10x more real memory and apply indexing to any data you
might want to retrieve quickly in some sorted order and/or sort it on
demand.

Terje

--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

On 05/01/2024 18:05, John Levine wrote:
> According to EricP <ThatWouldBeTelling@thevillage.com>:

<snip>

>> DG Nova had infinite indirection - if the Indirect bits was set in the
>> instruction then in the address register if the msb of the address was zero
>> then it was the address of the 16-bit data, if the msb of the address was 1
>> then it was the address of another address, looping until msb = 0.
>> I don't know how DG used it but, just guessing, because Nova only had
>> 4 registers might be to create a kind of virtual register set in memory.
>
> My guess is that it was cheap to implement and let them say look, here
> is a cool thing that we do and DEC doesn't. I would be surprised if
> there were many long indirect chains.
>
As has been mentioned elsewhere recently DEC did exactly this on the PDP-10.

Andy

According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>:
>On Mon, 22 Jan 2024 02:46:05 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:
>
>> IBM has a big development lab in Boeblingen which is about an hour from
>> Karlsruhe.
>
>At one time, IBM were the world’s biggest holder of patents. Their
>researchers came up with many clever ideas. But my impression was, very
>few of those ideas actually made it into their products.

A lot of patents are defensive, you don't necessarily plan to use them
but you don't want anyone else to own them.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

According to Vir Campestris <vir.campestris@invalid.invalid>:
>> My guess is that it was cheap to implement and let them say look, here
>> is a cool thing that we do and DEC doesn't. I would be surprised if
>> there were many long indirect chains.
>>
>As has been mentioned elsewhere recently DEC did exactly this on the PDP-10.

It was more complicated than that on the PDP-6/10. At each stage it not
only did indirection, it could also add in an index register. I can sort
of imagine how one might use all that for dynamically allocated array
rows but I never saw more than two levels in practice and never saw
indexing in indirect words.

In their defense, the addressing was very consistent, start with the
instruction word and keep indexing and indirecting until you come up
with the address.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> schrieb:
> On Sun, 21 Jan 2024 21:51:56 -0000 (UTC), Thomas Koenig wrote:
>
>> Not sure why they went to IBM with it, maybe DEC would have been a
>> better choice. Then again, the people at the computer center in
>> Karlsruhe were very mainframe-oriented...
>
> There seemed to be a lot of people like that, who only knew IBM and saw
> the whole world through IBM lenses. To the rest of us, IBM’s way of doing
> things just seemed overcomplicated, unwieldy, inflexible ... and
> expensive.

That wasn't the case here.

The mainframe they had at the computer center before was a UNIVAC
(don't know which model, it was decommissioned before I started
on the Siemens/Fujitsu mainframe there), and they had a Cyber 205.

So, maybe more mainframe-oriented, but not necessarily IBM.
But then again, the 4361 was not really a mainframe.

But proximity to of Karlsruhe to Böblingen (which John
L. mentioned) might well have been a factor. It is entirely
plausible that contacts existed, for example from students who
started to work there.

And, googling around for a bit, I find that the 4361 was indeed
developed at Böblingen. This probably settles it.

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> schrieb:
> According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>:
>>On Mon, 22 Jan 2024 02:46:05 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:
>>
>>> IBM has a big development lab in Boeblingen which is about an hour from
>>> Karlsruhe.
>>
>>At one time, IBM were the world’s biggest holder of patents. Their
>>researchers came up with many clever ideas. But my impression was, very
>>few of those ideas actually made it into their products.
>
> A lot of patents are defensive, you don't necessarily plan to use them
> but you don't want anyone else to own them.

Or you want to be able to use them at a later date, so nobody else
can patent that particular invention.

This has led to some patents being filed in Luxemburg only, for example.

Another method, which is getting harder in the age of search
engines, is the "secret" publication by publishing it somewhere
where it is unlikely to be found, such as the (non-existent)
"Acta Physical Mongolica".

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:
[unbounded indirection:]
>It was more complicated than that on the PDP-6/10. At each stage it not
>only did indirection, it could also add in an index register. I can sort
>of imagine how one might use all that for dynamically allocated array
>rows but I never saw more than two levels in practice and never saw
>indexing in indirect words.

The implementation of a logic variable is a parent-pointer tree where
you follow the parent pointer pointers until you are at the root
(which is a free variable or instantiated to a value). The automatic
unbounded indirection of the PDP-6/10 and Nova appears to be ideal for
that. And actually the most influential Prolog for quite a number of
years was DEC-10 Prolog; I don't know if it used that feature, but I
would be surprised if it did not. Still, Prolog could be implemented
on architectures without that feature.

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>

John Levine wrote:

> According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>:
>>On Mon, 22 Jan 2024 02:46:05 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:
>>
>>> IBM has a big development lab in Boeblingen which is about an hour from
>>> Karlsruhe.
>>
>>At one time, IBM were the world’s biggest holder of patents. Their
>>researchers came up with many clever ideas. But my impression was, very
>>few of those ideas actually made it into their products.

> A lot of patents are defensive, you don't necessarily plan to use them
> but you don't want anyone else to own them.

See, you cannot sue me for patent infringement, I am only doing what MY
patent on that mater allows.

According to MitchAlsup1 <mitchalsup@aol.com>:
>> A lot of patents are defensive, you don't necessarily plan to use them
>> but you don't want anyone else to own them.
>
>See, you cannot sue me for patent infringement, I am only doing what MY
>patent on that mater allows.

It's more than that. If someone threatens IBM with a patent suit, IBM's
usual response is that they have 100,000 patents in their portfolio, so
they're pretty sure that if they look, they will find something that
the other party is doing that looks like one of those patents and
will countersue. Patent suits are very expensive and IBM has
deep pockets.

Big companies often avoid this by cross-licensing, I won't sue you for
anything in our pile of patents if you won't sue me for anything in
your pile.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

John Levine wrote:

> According to MitchAlsup1 <mitchalsup@aol.com>:
>>> A lot of patents are defensive, you don't necessarily plan to use them
>>> but you don't want anyone else to own them.
>>
>>See, you cannot sue me for patent infringement, I am only doing what MY
>>patent on that mater allows.

> It's more than that. If someone threatens IBM with a patent suit, IBM's
> usual response is that they have 100,000 patents in their portfolio, so
> they're pretty sure that if they look, they will find something that
> the other party is doing that looks like one of those patents and
> will countersue. Patent suits are very expensive and IBM has
> deep pockets.

> Big companies often avoid this by cross-licensing, I won't sue you for
> anything in our pile of patents if you won't sue me for anything in
> your pile.

Yes, I used the small (startup) patent model.