Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

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Due to CDC 6600, IBM lost almost completely the market for what today would be called high-performance computing, which was then dominated for 3 decades by CDC and then by Cray, after Seymour Cray left CDC.

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.

Lynn Conway is one of those ACS inventors who deserves mention. In 1965 she invented generalized dynamic instruction scheduling, enabling multiple instructions to be issued out of order in a single clock cycle -- a foundational advance in superscalar architecture. IBM fired her in 1968 for transitioning. It took the company 52 years to apologize.

The business consequence wasn't merely losing a talented employee. IBM threw away the future contributions of someone who had already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to solve fundamental architectural problems. She subsequently helped launch the Mead-Conway VLSI design revolution at Xerox PARC, making chip design accessible to a much broader community. IBM's bigotry drove that talent, and the opportunity to cultivate her next breakthroughs, out of the company.

We can't put a dollar figure on that loss, or assume retaining her would have saved ACS. But growing System/360 profits don't establish that IBM had "little to worry about." They show how easily a lucrative existing business can conceal the opportunity cost of throwing away exceptional talent. Maybe IBM thought they had the luxury of affording prejudice and bigotry, but it wasn't a sound business judgment.

Perhaps IBM's treatment of Conway supplies another answer to Watson's question. A vast organization can have exceptional talent and still squander it. Conway's firing came after the CDC 6600, but dismissing a pioneering computer architect for transitioning hardly suggests that IBM's problem was a shortage of resources. Sometimes the obstacle between your engineers and the future is your own management's bigotry.

I wonder how much talent Elon Musk has driven away -- trans employees, people with trans family and friends, and anyone repelled by his public humiliation, deadnaming, and misgendering of his own daughter. How many breakthroughs will happen elsewhere because their inventors wanted nothing to do with him? Those losses won't appear as a line item on a balance sheet either.

An interesting connection: Seymour Cray's grandson Andrew Cray was a trans man and LGBTQ healthcare advocate. He married Sarah McBride in 2014, four days before he died of cancer. McBride later became the first openly trans person elected to the US Congress.

There's a dead comment in this thread by the fabled Don Hopkins, and the only reason I can imagine is that he commented, factually but negatively, on Elon Musk. Shameful comment-killing, just shameful.

I believe a lot of people on HN consider trans people rights something controversial and worth censoring.

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"

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