Old Architectures
summary
The talk surveys historical computer architectures, explaining how programmers’ mental models of a machine differ from its physical implementations and tracing how past designs led to today's systems. It presents concrete examples from vintage machines and the speaker’s own 1980s homemade computers, using that history to illuminate how current architectures emerged.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Introduction to theme
- 1:04Arco as architectural invention
- 2:30Leonardo da Vinci vs Henry Ford
- 5:00Invisible context of inventions
- 5:24Logarithmic slide rule
- 8:14Limits of analog computers
- 13:17Noise and precision in systems
- 15:04Evolution of mechanical computing
- 17:15Babbage's differential engine
- 19:19Analytical engine and punch cards
- 21:29Harvard Mark One in WWII
- 24:21Von Neumann architecture
- 26:51IBM 701 and binary instructions
- 30:51IBM 1401 and decimal design
- 33:19IBM 360 and modern architecture
- 35:08IBM 5500 and stacks
- 36:12CDC 6600 and supercomputers
- 38:38PDP and minicomputers
- 40:26Data flow and parallelism
- 41:07Microprocessors and legacy
- 44:47Q&A
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