Archive for March, 2012

IBM Advanced Computing System (1961-1969)

Saturday, March 24th, 2012

IBM and CDC developed some of the most innovative computer architectures during the 1960’s. The advanced 360 architectures such as the IBM 360/91 are well known for their pioneering implementations of instruction-level parallelism and register renaming. Before that, Project Stretch was famous for contributing many innovations to computer architecture. Less well known was the Advanced […]

Happy Dynamic Range Day – End the Loudness Wars

Saturday, March 17th, 2012

It’s that time of year again, and audio mastering engineer Ian Davis is reminding us to celebrate “Dynamic Range Day“.  This is about improving the sound of the audio recordings that we buy on CD and stream through the Internet. Specifically, it’s about compression.

Nice video about Colossus and Tommy Flowers

Monday, March 12th, 2012

Google has posted a nice little video about Bletchley Park and the Colossus machine, including nice remembrances of hardware designer Tommy Flowers.  There’s also a  posting about Tommy Flowers in the Google blog. I had the opportunity to see the reconstruction of Colossus in operation, breaking actual codes, when I visited the British National Museum […]