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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 1 comments | 20 Jun 16 18:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

This request originated via recent discussions on HN, and the forming of HARC! at YC Research. I'll be around for most of the day today (though the early evening).
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trsohmers ◴[20 Jun 16 21:14 UTC] No.11941636[source]▶
Hi Alan,

We met at a retreat last fall, and it was a real treat for me to hear some fantastic stories/anecdotes about the last 50 years of computing (which I have only been directly involved with for about 1/10th of). Another one of my computing heroes is Seymour Cray, which we talked about a bit and your time at Chippewa Falls. While a lot of HN'ers know about you talking about the Burroughs B5000, I (and I bet most others) would have had no idea that you got to work with Seymour on the CDC 6600. DO you have any particular Seymour Cray/6600 stories that you think would be of interest to the crowd?

Thanks again for doing this, and I hope to be able to talk again soon!

replies(1): >>11941941 #
1. alankay1 ◴[20 Jun 16 22:02 UTC] No.11941941[source]▶
Seymour Cray was a man of few words. I was there for three weeks before I realized he was not the janitor.

The "Chippewa OS" is too big a story for here, but it turned out that the official Control Data software team failed to come up with any software for the 6600! Hence a bunch of us from Livermore, Los Alamos, NCAR, etc. -- the places that had bought the machine -- were assembled in Chippewa Falls to "do something".

Perhaps the most interesting piece of unofficial software was a multitasking OS with graphical debugger for the 6600 that had been written by Seymour Cray -- to help debug the machine -- in octal absolute! I had the honor of writing a de-assembler for this system so we ordinary mortals could make changes and add to it (this was an amazing tour de force given the parallel architecture and multiple processes for this machine). And it was also a good object lesson for what Cray was really good at, and what he was not so good at (there were some really great decisions on this machine, and some really poor ones -- both sets quite extreme)