[Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

Sergey Oboguev oboguev at yahoo.com
Sun Mar 22 17:57:46 EDT 2015


> From: Henk Gooijen <henk.gooijen at hotmail.com>
> "up" and "down" is not the best translation for "P/V" operation.
> P stands for the Dutch word "passeer" which roughly translates to "pass".
> V stands for the Dutch word "verhoog" and that should be translated to "increment".

The history of early efforts in synchronization is fascinating.

Another fascinating piece along the same lines is a comment at Lamport's web page to one of his articles relating that when Alpha was being designed, the designers came to Lamport and asked if he can optimize his synchronization algorithm so that Alpha can get by with having no interlocked instructions (low contention was considered to be the primary use case)... and Lamport did, but even the optimized version of the algorithm was still deemed expensive, so Alpha team designed LL/SC into the processor.

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