Convex Architecture Handbook 1984 [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Convex Architecture Handbook 1984 [pdf]

bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de

70 pointscamel-cdr9 comments

Was working in Seismic Data Processing at the time and, a Cray being way too expensive, the Convex machine looked like the next Big Thing in our business, which was dominated by VAX 11/780 machines running attached array processors. We had some test code that I believe we ran on the third or sixth machine they built. Met Steve Wallach, I still have a signed copy of "The Soul of a New Machine" from him. Made a few trips to Convex, first in their rented space in a strip mall, then later to their bespoke factory. They really were something at the time.

Good times. We also got a Convex after the FPS AP-120 attached vector processor ran out of steam. The Convex guys were great to work with, tho they always traveled to us. Later, in a different life, I deployed a number of HP V-series boxes, which were in a sense the grandchildren of the Convexen.

The second building wasn’t bespoke, it had formerly been a used to manufacture fiberglass pools.

The third building (near the UT Dallas campus) was built for Convex.

Everything was in Richardson, TX, as this was a funding requirement by Sevin-Rosen-Bayless.

Steve’s son Dan is a CS prof at Rice.

was it true, as the manual says, that 'coupling the host to an external array processor improves performance, but such systems are difficult to program and are expensive'?

what did you think of the convex architecture? a first skim over the manual makes it sound almost indistinguishable from the cray-1

Still true today (I hate GPU’s)

In 1997 they had 67 machines in the top 500. Sun had 60. ( Third and fourth ).

This site looks to be a mirror of Bitsavers? It has more on Convex. The overview ( http://bitsavers.org/pdf/convex/C-1_Overview.pdf ) is more high-level look at it.

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/convex/

And 1000bit has brochures

https://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/brochures.asp?id=538

BitSavers automatically redirects you top the closest(?) mirror so I guess that's where the uni-stuttgart.de URL comes from.

Bitsavers is cool. They also offer an rsync endpoint so that you can efficiently mirror the whole collection. I have a mirror at home (it's about 1.5TB by now) and every weekend I check out the new stuff that came in this week. So much interesting history being preserved there!

bitsavers hasn't auto-redirected in years, but it is random where the search engines will pull from a mirror.

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