Hacker News Reader

I got to the end of the paper before I noticed that it was published in the April issue of Communications of the ACM. I have a hard time believing that this is not an April Fool's Day joke.

I provide as evidence this line from near the end of the paper: "Thanks are due ... to Mr. V. A. Vyssotsky for manually simulating the 704 simulating STRETCH simulating Chaostron"

View on HN

The 704 was a vacuum tube machine (predecessor of the 709 and later on the transistorized 7040/7090 series). STRETCH (IBM 7030) was a vastly faster system (of which about 30 total were sold, hence the difficulty of getting one for this project). Simulating a STRETCH on a 704 would be ghastly. I have no idea what the effect of doing this manually would have been on Mr Vyssotsky.

Vyssotsky later achieved some notoriety as the technical lead on an obscure project called Multics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com