14 Jun
2026
14 Jun
'26
11:33 a.m.
That's fair, though I think in the context Luiz used to make this point, it
remains remarkable. He used to argue that the success of an architecture
(be it software or hardware) is only loosely related to how well thought
out and "elegant" it is, and is much more influenced by successfully
building a long-lived ecosystem (which, arguably, the S/360 example
demonstrates as well). Despite x86 being a stop-gap hodgepodge, it
succeeded against much more elegant and modern designs because of
extraneous factors unrelated to the design itself. He made that point in
writing (to some extent, given the limited context of a one-pager) in his
"Innovate Within" manifesto:
https://datacenter-book.org/essays/innovate-within
On Sun, Jun 14, 2026 at 11:17 AM Paul Koning <paulkoning(a)comcast.net> wrote:
On Jun 14, 2026, at 1:48 PM, Nadav Eiron via
cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
The late Luiz Barroso used to say that the x86 ISA is the most successful
ISA ever designed, by sheer numbers and longevity.
By numbers, probably, though it may be ARM at this point. By longevity,
certainly not, since the IBM/360 ISA is still around and is almost a decade
older.
paul