Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!stl!tom From: tom@stl.stc.co.uk (Tom Thomson) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Historical architectural advances?? Message-ID: <3453@stl.stc.co.uk> Date: 1 Oct 90 16:54:46 GMT References: <4713@latvax8.lat.oz> <3300185@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <40705@siemens.siemens.com> Sender: news@stl.stc.co.uk Reply-To: "Tom Thomson" Organization: STC Technology Limited, London Road, Harlow, Essex, UK Lines: 15 >>... I think Perkin-Elmer had the first >>32-bit supermini (but it could have been Gould). Of course the first commercial supermini was the ICL 2903; that was a 24bit machine, not a 32bit one. Its introduction effectively created the (European) market for superminis, in the early 70s. Interesting that the list so far seems to be very american - - I guess that's just the usual transatlantic chauvinism, nothing can conceivably happened this side of the pond since Atlas? Would you regard things like Content Addressable File Store, or the Distributed Array Processor, or an Algol-68 oriented machine as architectural advances? They all came out of ICL in the 70s. Or how about Iliffe's Basic Language Machine and all the ideas that that started off? Or Iann Barron's Modular One machine? Or Colmerauers work at Marseille (assuming software architecture counts)?