14 Nov
2017
14 Nov
'17
7:10 p.m.
I think the 360 marked the change from hardware-driven
development to
software-driven. The 'arcane' architectures would have maximised
performance for a given amount of hardware, and programmers were
relatively cheap. But the 360 reversed that, hardware was now cheap
and didn't need to work at 100% efficiency, but software development
was expensive so writing and re-writing needed to be minimised.
Computer Science seems to be mostly developed in the 1968 - 1973 time
frame by average people with access with a (personal) computer with
about 32K of memory. All the new software development was Time Sharing
of some kind, or a revised BETTER our NEW programming language, that
wants faster and larger core memory and the deluxe Binary-Trinary-Decary
virtual ALU*.
That why I suspect the state of computers is so dismal today.
Ben.
* Implemented by a patented serial computron.
PS: Strange how Unix runs millions of users, and Multics never
really made it out of the lab.