Tasty » Adam Sampson's stretch bookmarks

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

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