| Robert (bob) Barton |
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Chief architect of the B5000 and other computers such as the B1700 . He should be one of the best known computer architects with a name as recognizable as Seymour Cray and Gene Amdahl . In fact, he probably surpasses these architects in terms of designing high-level architectures where software and hardware were designed together, the hardware being designed to directly support the needs of software. While Cray and Amdahl were brilliant at designing hardware for speed, Cray developing techniques such as pipelines, parallelism, and register scoreboards in the CDC6000, Barton designed machines at a more abstract level, not tied to the technology constraints of the time. Thus Barton's design of the B5000 lives on in the modern ClearPath/MCP mainframes of Unisys. These modern incarnations of the B5000 actually use the hardware techniques of Seymour Cray in their current implementations, making them extremely powerful mainframe systems. Whereas Cray's machines became supercomputers (those suited to single heavy-duty tasks such as modelling and weather prediction), Barton's mainframe machines are now better described as servers, which perform many small tasks simultaneously, such as database requests and transaction processing. Thus mainframes and supercomputers are very different beasts, mainframes being powerful systems able to do many things at once, and supercomputers being powerful systems which are dedicated to a single or a small number of computational tasks. While we will always need supercomputers, their market space is much smaller than the commercial market place of mainframes and servers. Barton's thinking has been more influential than just the design of the B5000 – he also influenced the thinking of one Alan Kay in the development of object-oriented programming, Smalltalk, and the modern GUI systems built into the Macintosh and later Windows. For more on Barton's innovative work see the article on the B5000 . EXTERNAL LINKS |
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