[Simh] Looking for a milestone

[Clem Cole]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 12:35 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net>
wrote:

> That doesn't excuse sloppy work.


​Agreed - and you will rarely see me defend Seymour.   His systems were
fast, but they were not programmer friendly in any way IMO.  Heck the man
never had an assembler - he did not think it was needed, he used programmed
in octal.

As I said, close enough for government work seemed to be his mantra; and as
long as the US National Labs kept buying from him, clearly he was getting
feedback that was an ok way to design.

Then again our own old employer, DEC took a long time to get around to
using an IEEE FP scheme. While DEC was *much better *at arithmetic than
CDC/Cray ever was, it was not until the PMAX and Alpha that DEC started to
support IEEE.​  My old friend and colleague Bob Hanek (whom I used to joke
as the Mr. Floating Point), once said to me at lunch, he thought trying to
get correct results from the Vax FP unit made him lose his hair.  Note that
Bob was hardly a great fan of IEEE either, he can regale you with stories
of issues with it also.  As I an OS guy, I would smile and just say, I'll
thankfully leave that you guys in the compiler and runtime.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/pipermail/simh/attachments/20161017/504dc925/attachment-0001.html>