Extremely CISC instructions

[Van Snyder]

On Tue, 2021-08-24 at 11:11 -0700, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> On 8/24/21 10:40 AM, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote:
> 
> > That's the BLAS SAXPY (or DAXPY) routine, a fundamental step in
> > Gaussian elimination.
> 
> Speaking of which, do any specimens of the Saxpy Matrix-1 still
> exist?
> Saxpy Computer was a brief flash in the supercomputing universe; fell
> onto bad times when a former employee was caught selling secrets to
> the
> Soviets.   Afterward, the company went into bankruptcy, if memory
> serves, sometime in the 1980s.
> 
> SAXPY was a program in the LINPACK suite, and well known to FORTRAN
> benchmarkers.  Ref:
> http://www.netlib.org/lapack/explore-3.1.1-html/saxpy.f.html  Since
> LINPACK could well mean the difference between a sale and a "thanks
> for
> trying", it received a lot of attention.

I was at the first Supercomputing conference at the Westin Bonaventure
Hotel in Los Angeles, with two of the four authors of the first BLAS
paper -- Charles Lawson and Fred Krogh. Fred asked the PR flack for
SAXPY whether he knew the origin of his company's name. He did not.
Richard Hanson had recently moved from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to
Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque. I lost track of Dave
Kincaid. Sadly, Lawson and Hanson have passed away.

> 
> --Chuck
> 
>