Interesting to note the question had the answer all along. How would a modest effort outrun a vast organisation?
I never imagined he’d be caught by that mistake.
I never imagined he’d be caught by that mistake.
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"So, let me tell you a little bit, a few of the problems, that ah, and the solutions that I see in building large computers. First of all... I think that building large computers should be done with the fewest possible people. One is perfect, but you can't quite work with one. So.. the next best thing is about 12."
"The reason you need 12 is you kind of need one person from each of the disciplines that are necessary. You need a mechanical engineer to build the box that it'll go in. You need an electrical engineer to put the circuit together. You need a little bit of logic... and programmer here and there And you need a secretary of course. But not very many."
Someone should make that imagery into an educational video.
In many ways, the 6600 would be unthinkable to IBM - it was a very limited machine, with 60-bit words and no character addressability, just ludicrously fast (and cool looking). The central processor was augmented by 12 peripheral processors that offloaded IO and other tasks from the CPU (not sure IBM did that, but this - channel processors and channel programs - is a pattern that was common on IBM mainframes at least after the 360).
It's very normal to slow down new model releases so they don't cannibalize too much of the sales of previous established lines. CDC was a very lean company, while IBM had a lot of different lines to protect from their own disruption.
It's always an important thing to remember it's better to develop the product that will kill your cash cow, because someone will, and you don't want it to be your competition.
However, during that time the market for lower-cost and acceptable performance computers was expanding very quickly, so IBM had growing revenues and profits, without being affected by the loss of a smaller market.
They were more strongly affected by the ascension of DEC, as the main vendor of minicomputers, which took the lower end of the market from IBM, but the medium-performance market, especially for business data processing, where the greatest profits were achievable, remained dominated by IBM, so they had little to worry about.
As a response to CDC 6600, IBM had the internal development project ACS (Advanced Computer Systems), which was eventually cancelled, as diverting resources from the money maker that was the IBM System/360 line.
Had ACS not been cancelled, it would have had good chances to become the fastest computer of the world, because its design team invented many techniques that were introduced in computers only almost a quarter of century later, e.g. unrestricted out-of-order and superscalar execution with fine-grained multi-threading.
As for Elon, I will call the website Twitter, because if he can deadname his daughter, I can deadname his companies as well.
After the acquisition of Twitter, a large number of talented people walked away, a lot because of his attitude towards work-life balance, and, I assume, later, as his darkest side became more and more public (culminating in Trump's inauguration Dr. Strangelove event), a lot of the remaining talent left for healthier pastures. That period was full of outages and data loss.
On @DonHopkins, I love his "FORTH ?KNOW IF HONK ELSE FORTH LEARN THEN"