Tasty » Adam Sampson's architecture bookmarks

BTI Computer Systems History edit / delete

Small vendor of timesharing minicomputers in the 70s and 80s. Quite a bit of detail about the BTI-8000 architecture, which sounds like a pretty interesting machine (and which seems not to have a lot of surviving software).

to architecture bti retrocomputing timesharing ... on 20 March 2021

Washington Tunnels edit / delete

"Washington sits atop an interconnected layer cake of transportation, utility, and pedestrian tunnels extending three dimensionally beneath city streets. Given their importance to daily life in the nation's capital, it's surprising to find that the full picture of Washington's various tunnels remains unpainted. This project aims to complete that picture." I'm reminded of Joseph Brennan's transit site...

to architecture history transport tunnel us ... on 08 January 2019

Relaxed-Memory Concurrency edit / delete

"This page collects work by a group of people working to develop mathematically rigorous and usable semantics for multiprocessor programs." The gap between what the manual says, what the processor actually does, and what programmers can reason about -- lots of interesting stuff.

to architecture cmp202 concurrency cpu memory-models ... on 24 October 2018

Computer Architecture History / CPU History -- Mark Smotherman edit / delete

"I want to collect here information on historical firsts and on important machines that are relatively unknown and/or are underappreciated." Excellent articles on STRETCH and similar systems.

to architecture history ibm retrocomputing stretch ... on 07 June 2018

Computer Systems edit / delete

IBM's "Future Systems" project, and related initiatives. There are some interesting architectural ideas here.

to architecture future-systems history ibm retrocomputing ... on 07 June 2018

Stretch-ing Is Great Exercise: It Gets You in Shape to Win - IEEE Journals & Magazine edit / delete

Fred Brooks on the IBM Stretch project, which pioneered pipelining, 8-byte bytes, multihead hard disks, and various other things we take for granted today. I particularly liked this bit about ECC memory: "The contract required that Stretch run for a month with better than 90% availability. The machine chugged along great and was hovering right above the 90% line when one bit driver, or else one sense amplifier, failed completely! For the rest of the acceptance test, the IBM team just ran it the way it was. There was not time to stop and fix it; stopping would have ruined the statistics. So the Stretch ran along to the end of the month single-error correcting every memory access from that box."

to architecture ecc history ibm pipelining retrocomputing stretch ... on 16 February 2018

Twice the bits, twice the trouble: vulnerabilities induced by migrating to 64-bit platforms | the morning paper edit / delete

"In this study, Wressnegger et al. reveal how a codebase originally written for 32-bit, and which is perfectly secure on 32-bit platforms, can have new vulnerabilities simply by compiling it for 64-bit systems." No surprises for anyone who follows oss-security etc., but the paper's a good overview.

to architecture porting security vulnerabilities ... on 06 April 2017

Proposed Electronic Calculator, by Alan Turing (48 pp.) undated edit / delete

Proposal for what became the ACE, circa 1945. Among many other things, this introduces the BURY and UNBURY opcodes (which these days we'd call PUSH and POP) and their application in function linkage.

to ace architecture electronics history retrocomputing turing ... on 05 April 2017

Data-Oriented Design (Or Why You Might Be Shooting Yourself in The Foot With OOP) – Games from Within edit / delete

A student pointed me at this a couple of years ago -- cache-friendly programming from a games perspective.

to ag0803 architecture cache games performance programming ... on 14 October 2016

Friends of Williamson's Tunnels | est. 1996 edit / delete

"The Williamson Tunnels are a labyrinth of tunnels and underground caverns under the Edge Hill district of Liverpool in north-west England. They were built in the first few decades of the 1800s under the control of a retired tobacco merchant called Joseph Williamson."

to architecture history liverpool subterranea tunnels ... on 08 September 2016