[COFF] In Memoriam: Jay W. Forrester, happy birthday Gene Amdahl, and LSD

[Clem Cole]

On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 12:14 AM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 16 Nov 2019, Peter Jeremy wrote:
>
> > More than just the instruction set - IBM published a formal description
> > of the S/360 (in APL in the IBM Systems Journal issue that announced the
> > S/360).  The S/360 was (I believe) the first case where a company
> > announced a computer architecture (rather than an implementation) and
> > implementations were expected to precisely comply with the architecture
> > (no more finding undocumented instructions and side-effects and writing
> > code that depended on them).  This meant that clone makers could build a
> > clone that accurately emulated a S/360.
>
> Ah, I'd forgotten about the APL documentation; thanks!  Talk about giving
> away the keys to the kingdom: Amdahl, Fujitsu, Hitachi...
>

The cat was already out and poking around with the publishing of:  IBM 360
Principles of Operation, DOC A22-6821-0
<http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/360/princOps/A22-6821-0_360PrincOps.pdf>.
The
APL version of spec just gave it more area to roam.
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