And speaking of ALGOL

[Chuck Guzis]

On 08/11/2015 08:37 AM, Paul Koning wrote:

> No, it was a CDC product, but developed by CDC Holland (at their
Rijswijk office). Apparently it was created at the insistence of a
number of CDC’s academic customers in Europe.

Which explains why I never saw it at CPD SVLOPS.  CDC in those days was 
fond of "bootleg" products.  MACE/KRONOS/NOS being the chiefest of them. 
  At least one program that I wrote (in a week) was turned into an 
official product, complete with reference manual.  It was never intended 
as anything more than a way fro me to get my own work done.  "Ports" of 
it were downright silly.

> Which makes sense; it demonstrates what nearly everyone now knows,
> which is that RISC architecture is a very good way to design a
> computer.

What it told me was that byte.character addressability wasn't all that 
it was cracked up to be.  Even after the CYBER 70 introduced the CMU (on 
the 72/73 only; not on the 74), use of it didn't contribute massively to 
the speed of COBOL.

> I suspect part of the reason is that Algol wasn’t all that popular in
> the USA even if its heyday. Add to that the fact that most computer
> designers weren’t all that skilled in software. And finally, as the
> RISC experience has shown, it isn’t really worth it.

...which is why we're all working in x86 today. :)

What RISC does demand is a fast memory system.  The 6600 had 1 usec 
memory interleaved 10 ways, so it could issue a read or write every 
machine cycle (100 nsec).  Without that, the 6600 could well have been a 
real dog.

--Chuck