The undocumented instructions in the 8085 were described in detail in Dr Dobb's Journal shortly after announcement of the 8085 (with no mention of the "new" instructions).
The 6600 was not a superscalar machine but simply a pipelined processor. Superscalar machines first appeared in the floating point processor of the IBM 360/91 and may well be due to John Cocke (IBM) who generalized the notion. Yale Patt (UC Berkeley, U Michigan, U Texas at Austin) refined the ideas. Most processors designed today have superscalar features.
The 6600 had multiple functional units - 2 floating point multipliers, a divider, two adders, etc.,[1] and if the instruction stream allowed it, many of them could be running at the same time. So it was a superscalar machine.
To be superscalar, a processor must initiate multiple instructions per clock cycle. Having multiple functional units isn't sufficient to be superscalar if one instruction is dispatched at a time. You get higher performance from the multiple functional units since the next instruction isn't blocked while the previous one is executing.
According to "Modern Processor Design: Fundamentals of Superscalar Processors", the CDC 6600 was not superscalar because it had scalar instruction issue. This book says the IBM Advanced Computer system was the first superscalar design, but the project was canceled.
This is just a definitional issue. Older thinking was that having several instructions in progress at once was enough to be superscalar. Modern thinking seems to be that you have to initiate multiple instructions on the same clock cycle. Sources differ.
Here's a good overview of the CDC 6600.[1]
Multiple execution units yes, multiple operations in progress yes, scoreboard yes, retirement unit no, branch prediction no, reordering no.
Well, I can't stop you from using a nonstandard definition :-) The original definition of superscalar from Agerwala and Cocke of IBM was dispatching multiple instructions to the execution units every cycle. This is the same definition used by the other sources I've checked.
The People's Computer Company published many BASIC games in its publications (PCC Newspaper, People's Computers, Dr. Dobbs Journal, Recreational Computing) and in the book, What to Do After You Hit Return: Or, P.C.C.'s First Book of Computer Games. Many of the games were reprinted elsewhere, often without attribution.
I worked on the MUMPS Standard when I taught in the Medical Informatics Committee at UC San Francisco. When I first encountered the language, I was appalled. For example, in pre-standard MUMPS, lines with no trailing blanks and lines with one trailing blank had a different interpretation. For those interested, https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/hb/nbshandbook118.p.... At one of the standardization meetings, I embarrassed myself by called MUMPS a "viral disease" because of the pathology of the programming language as defined to an audience of people who saw it as a practical tool they used every day. The standard helped stabilize the language. I acquired an appreciation for the incredible skill application programmers can adapt a general purpose extensible language to do their bidding.
Why do we even need banks? What does the financial industry provide? If we were to restructure everything, what would make sense? What are the invariant properties of a viable financial system?
Who else is going to lend you money to buy a house or start a business? Who else will keep your money safe from fire and theft and pay you for the privilege?
Wait. We are exploring boundaries and understanding and not necessarily maintaining the present system. Money? Lend? Ownership? Business? Protecting money? Payments? Privilege? Banking? These are all up for rethinking.
Feel free to come up with a new system that works better. Good luck (so far, all alternatives have proved worse, and not just slightly worse but terribly worse)
Everyone should read this summary/review of the "debate".
More important, everyone should read the paper being debated: Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs, Richard A. De Millo (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Richard J. Lipton and Alan J. Perlis
(Yale University). This is one of my favorite CS papers because it exposes a lot of the mechanism behind making proofs that are convincing. What does it mean to say you have proven something.
Eric Mitchell will discuss the problem of detecting machine-generated text followed by an open forum Q&A.
Part of EE380, Stanford EE Computer Systems Forum.
Don't believe this article. If adding automation and robots to the mix does not decrease cost, it is not going to happen. Labor is the only free variable.
It is a real loss, Gumby. Carl and I were friends and spent hours on the telephone solving the problems of the world and playing polymath math. Hardly a day would go by without an hour or so chat with Carl.
