25 Microchips that “Shook the World”
IEEE Spectrum has an article in its May 2009 issue called “25 Microchips that shook the world“. Not long or deep, but an interesting mix of chips from the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and the 2000s. Recommended as...
View ArticleIt was Twenty Years Ago Today
Unless you have been living under a rock I guess the media deluge has made it clear that it was twenty years ago on November ninth that the Berlin Wall fell. Wow. Without a doubt the most momentous and...
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Matt’s Today in History: System/360
I am a regular listener to the Matt’s Today in History podcast. When Matt asked for contributions for this spring (in order to meet a goal of 500 podcasts before Summer) I did give some thought to what...
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Pipeline Performance Simulator Anno 1960
I have just found what almost has to be the first cycle-accurate computer simulator in history. According to the article “Stretch-ing is Great Exercise — It Gets You in Shape to Win” by Frederick...
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EDSAC – First Bootloader and Assembler
The EDSAC was an early computer in the mathematics laboratory at Cambridge in the UK. I have just read an old article on the machine and how it was programmed, from a 1998 issue of the IEEE Annals of...
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Simple Machine, Hard to Simulate
In the June 2010 issue of Communications of the ACM, as well as the April 2010 edition of the ACM Queue magazine, George Phillips discusses the development of a simulator for the graphics system of the...
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Cubase64 – Impressive Impossible Retro
I recently read the “Cubase64 White Paper” by Pex Tufvesson. It is a fantastic piece of retro computing, where he makes a Commodore 64 do real-time audio effects on a sampled piece of music. There is a...
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Wind River Blog: 20, 30, 60 years ago
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about some computing history. Wind River turns thirty this year, Simics twenty, and simulation for debug (and probably debug in general) turns sixty....
View ArticleSteve Furber: Emulated BBC Micro on Archimedes on PC
I just read an interview with Steve Furber, the original ARM designer, in the May 2011 issue of the Communications of the ACM. It is a good read about the early days of the home computing revolution in...
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IBM i – I’m Impressed
From what little I had heard and read, the IBM AS/400 (later known as iSeries, and now known as simply IBM i) sounded like a fascinating system. I knew that it had a rich OS stack that contained most...
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Wind River Blog: Surfing the Web with Netscape 4
Just for fun, I tried to surf the web of today using a Netscape 4 browser from 2001. The result: not exactly useful. Netscape 4 was bad back then, and it does not work at all with the current style of...
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DV* 30 Years
On the very binary date of 11-11-11, my alma mater, the computer science (DV, for datavetenskap) education at Uppsala University celebrated its thirty years’ anniversary. It was a great classic student...
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Reverse History Part One
For some reason, when I think of reverse execution and debugging, the sound track that goes through my head is a UK novelty hit from 1987, “Star Trekkin” by the Firm. It contains the memorable line...
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Reverse History Part Two – Research
This is the second post in my series on the history of reverse execution, covering various early research papers. It is clear that reverse debugging has been considered a good idea for a very long...
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Reverse History Part Three – Products
In this final part of my series on the history of reverse debugging I will look at the products that launched around the mid-2000s and that finally made reverse debugging available in a commercially...
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“Eagle” Cycle-Accurate Simulator Anno 1979
I recently read the classic book The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Even though it describes the project to build a machine that was launched more than 30 years ago, the story is still fresh...
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Reverse Execution History Updates
After some discussions at the S4D conference last week, I have some additional updates to the history and technologies of reverse execution. I have found one new commercial product at a much earlier...
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The First 64-bit Phone
Apple just released their new iPhone 5s, where the biggest news is really the 64-bit processor core inside the new A7 SoC. Sixty four bits in a phone is a first, and it immediately raises the old...
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Why DO Computers Fail?
I just found and read an old text in the computer systems field, “Why Do Computers Fail and What Can Be Done About It?” , written by Jim Gray at Tandem Computers in 1985. It is a really nice overview...
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Fortress Rochester
In a dusty bookshelf at work I found an ancient tome of wisdom, long abandoned by its previous owner. I was pointed to it by a fellow explorer of the dark arts of computer system design as something...
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