3 Dec
2004
3 Dec
'04
8:54 a.m.
On Fri, 3 Dec 2004, Brad Parker wrote:
yup. Now I never met him, of course, but he's pretty roundly
reviled. I'm reading the Babbage Inst's reprint and even there,
it states that though Aiken was a lecturer, that 'he largely
seemed unaware of the importance of what was being discussed
[fully electronic stored-program...] and delved in deeply to
the workings of his relay calculators' (paraphrase from memory)
Apparently working in his shop was like slavery. I've not
read one account that actually liked the guy. Overbearing
empire-builder and Spender of Govt Money. Nice calculators
though.
(The arch ref is that the relay calc programs were stored
on very wide punched tape, external to data storage. They
were truly significant machines of great power and
complexity (logical error-checking, remote consoles,
skip-to-next-queued-up-program-on-error, all sorts of
nicities. He simply was an unpleasant person.)
(There's
also some really bad info out there on the origins
of "Harvard" architecture, attributed to some stupid hardvard
vs. princeton microprocessor design thing. Please -- about 40
years earlier: that asshole Aiken. No one liked him anyways.)
(ok, that made my laugh. pretty hard.)
Aiken. Howard was it? Next I think we should rag on Danny Hillis and that
silly connection
machine. I remember asking, "so, with 64 cpus you run 64 compiles at
one time, right?" and the interviewer said, "no, no ones ever done
that". I walked out shaking my head and didn't take the job.
TO be honest I don't know much about all the parallel processing
stuff; so they were somewhat silly?