Daniel W. Dobberpuhl | Hacker News Reader

Daniel W. Dobberpuhl

en.wikipedia.org

48 pointsstmw14 comments

Another one gone? Oh heck.

The Alpha had the closest thing to beauty in an ISA I've ever seen. Reading about the design motivations of that really made me understand the value of understanding tradeoffs, if that makes sense. It was a work of art.

If I may also mention, I understand Henry S. Warren, author of Hacker's Delight also died recently.

RIP, and I'd wish I'd met both of you.

I love to listen to Sophie Wilson, the inventor of the ARM instruction set - to me a real geek and hacker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson

Love hearing about the people and stories involved with the creation of Acorn and ARM systems. As a kid I was a big fan of Acorn computers, and still have a soft spot now.

Back then I was really excited when the StrongARM processor came out. The RiscPC, which used it, was significantly more powerful than any previous Acorn and had an innovative case which you could expand by adding ‘slices’ to hold more hardware. It also included an optional 486 processor board to run Windows at the same time.

Remember seeing one machine that someone had expanded to over 15 slices and included a sandwich grill.

The “rocket ship” RISC PC. The top slice was a (working!) kitchen sink. http://www.john-ward.org.uk/personal/john/computers/html/roc...

That’s amazing! I’m so glad that someone else remembers it (and that I remembered it fairly accurately 20-odd years later).

Saw it in an issue of Acorn User and thought it was literally the best thing ever.

There were some very nice early ARM-Linux boards based on it. For example, the LART was an open design made by a group at the Delft University centered on the SA1100. Pretty cool times especially if you were into embedded devices that could connect to the Internet.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000816095212/http://www.lart.t...

It looks like every time he had a nice place to work on integrated circuits the company was bought up by a bigger company and then he left, only to be bought yet again. Almost as if there was no escape.

Funny, I read it the other way: he got to work on a sequence of projects based on very architectures (VAX, Alpha, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC), lead them all to significant success, then moved on to repeat the magic at a different company and a different architecture.

Doesn't that sound more fun than being the "VAX microprocessor" guy forever? (Assuming that architecture had stuck around.)

He was a phenomenal engineer and I had not realized he’d passed away. Thanks stmw, though it was sad news.

Yeah, I saw the news of his passing and it seemed like the right thing to highlight. Many current semiconductor CTO's were commenting on same sadness and his great impact.

I have collected a few CPUs from retired systems that I keep on the upper ledge of my IBM model M keyboard. One of those chips is a 21164.

Rest in peace, Dan Dobberphul.

There are 4 StrongARM systems in the room with me right now, none powered up but they were still good machines for their time.

I built supercomputers out of Alphas for 2 generations, and prototyped a supercomputer built with SiByte's chip. Great architecture, and I was reasonably confident that SiByte would turn out to be good given Dan's background. RIP.

Does anyone know what led him to be such a productive engineer? I would love to hear about his design principles and his routines.

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