From Michael Newman,Managing Director,Pacific Associates Ltd.Frimley Business Park, Camberley GU16 5SG
Amusing isn’t it, how the boys at Hewlett-Packard are busy re-inventing many of the wheels pioneered on the IBM System/38 (and refined in the AS/400) – but without the credit (CI No 2,326). But justice of sorts, I suppose – IBM did it with Virtual Storage on the System/370. Still, it’s uncanny how many of the 15 year- old System/38 principles are being rediscovered. 64-bit addressing to implement single-level storage (there’s a recent HP White Paper concluding that althoguh difficult to do, this is a good idea); a hardware abstraction layer (called a microkernel by the Posix boys) to insulate the applications and operating system from the hardware; and an object-oriented operating system (though the System/38 and the AS/400 implement objects in the microcoded abstraction layer). And now here’s HP implementing the long instruction concept of the System/38 Horizontal Microcode – so that multiple hardware operations can be executed simultaneously – and developing the System/38 ‘cascade compiler’ technique of producing meta-code (called IRP code on System/38) which is then optimised for the hardware by a microcoded translator which produces highly efficient machine-executable microcode. What goes around comes around. But it would be nice to see a nod of acknowledgement now and again to the System/38 pioneers who designed all of this stuff in 1972…
