Gordon Bell wins S. Cray Award

On Sep 20, 2014, at 3:53 PM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote: Interesting. Some small errors in that: the 64 kW disk is the RC11/RS64. It has a sector size of 32 words. The next one was the RF11, 256 kW. That?s the one that is word addressable. The pdp11/memos section of Bitsavers has a very interesting sequence of documents showing major redirects early on. Never mind the PDP-X; after that, there are a string of PDP-11 documents, including what calls itself a ?final? instruction set spec, that describe something utterly different, more like a 16-bit PDP-8 (or 16-bit PDP-9? I don?t remember the -9 well). The next batch is more like the final design but even there you can see a bunch of major differences. So it looks like it took at least 3 iterations, not counting the PDP-X, to arrive at the PDP-11 architecture. I guess you could say that became a DEC tradition. VAX seems to have taken fewer tries, though even there you can see memos that show an early approach that wasn?t what we ended up with. DEC RISC took three tries (Titan, Prism, Alpha), and in that case all three were built as real hardware rather than being abandoned while still in the paper stage. paul