Gene Amdahl, the noted American computer architect, passed away on
November 10th, aged 92.
Amdahl was the chief architect of the
IBM System/360, a general purpose
mainframe architecture that was incredibly successful during the 60's
and which heavily influenced the architecture of many of the
computers that we all use today.
Prior to the S/360, computers tended to be architected for specific
roles, such as either accounting or scientific computing.
The S/360 was an all encompassing architecture - "360 degrees" -
and IBM shipped tens of thousands of them which helped make the
company one of the richest and most powerful companies that had ever
existed up to that time.
One large customer for the S/360 was NASA and five were used on the
Apollo 11 mission. One of the S/360's was used to process in real-time
the enormous amount of telemetry data that was then displayed on the
mission controller's screens. It also performed vital tasks such as
compute the data for trajectory and orbit so that the lunar module
"Eagle" could liftoff and rendezvous with "Columbia".
Obituary here -
http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...13/gene-amdahl
