Gerrit Blaauw
Gerrit Anne (Gerry) Blaauw (b. July 17, 1924, The Hague, Netherlands; Ph.D. Harvard, 1952) is one of the principal designers of the IBM System/360 line of computers, together with Fred Brooks, Gene Amdahl, and others.[1]
Career [edit]
In 1947, Blaauw won an exclusive scholarship funded by IBM Chief Executive Officer Thomas J. Watson. After an initial year at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, Blaauw studied at Harvard University with Howard Aiken, inventor of the early Mark I computer. At Harvard, he worked on design of the Mark III and Mark IV computers. Blaauw met Fred Brooks while he was working for IBM and visited Harvard, where Fred Brooks was then a graduate student. After graduation, Blaauw returned to the Netherlands where he worked on the second ARRA computer.[1]
In 1955 he returned to the United States to work at IBM's Poughkeepsie labs where he worked with Brooks on a number of projects:
- He was a designer on the IBM 7030 STRETCH project.
- He worked on the ill-fated IBM 8000 series, and in particular designed a paging system for the IBM 8106 in the 1960-1961 period.[2]
- He was a key engineer on the IBM System/360 project, announced in 1964. Among other contributions, Blaauw made the successful case for an 8-bit (as opposed to 6-bit) design.
- He designed a revolutionary address translation system, the "Blaauw Box", which was removed from the original System/360 design, but was later used in IBM's unsuccessful proposal to MIT's Project MAC.[3] Subsequently Data Address Translation (DAT) hardware of a somewhat different design was incorporated in the important IBM System/360-67 computer.[4] As implemented on the Model 67,[5] DAT hardware allowed the implementation of some of the first practical paged virtual memory systems – perhaps the first to be commercially successful. The Model 67 was being used in commercial applications by 1968. The earlier Ferranti Atlas Computer was a seminal platform for paging research, but suffered from well-studied performance issues such as thrashing.[6] Virtual memory address translation capabilities similar to those on the S/360-67 were subsequently included in all models of the IBM System/370 computer line that followed.
After leaving IBM, Blaauw became a computer science professor in the Netherlands. He retired in 1989 as professor emeritus with Universiteit Twente.[1] In 1997 he co-authored Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution with Brooks.[7]
See also [edit]
References [edit]
- Pugh, Emerson W.; Lyle R. Johnson, and John H. Palmer (1991). IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-16123-0. [Extensive (819 pp.) treatment of IBM's offerings during this period. Blaauw is mentioned on numerous pages.]
- G. M. Amdahl, G. A. Blaauw, F. P. Brooks,Jr., "Architecture of the IBM System/360", IBM Journal of Research and Development, 8(2) April 1964, pp. 87–101
- ^ a b c "Gerrit Blaauw" in Unsung Heroes in Dutch Computing History, a website created for the IEEE Computer Society's Web Programming Competition (CHC61), 2007
- ^ Pugh, op. cit., p. 740 note 197
- ^ The IBM 360/67 and CP/CMS, Tom Van Vleck, 1995, 1997, 2005, 2009
- ^ "Program and Addressing Structure in a Time-Sharing Environment", B. W. Arden , B. A. Galler , T. C. O'Brien , F. H. Westervelt, Journal of the ACM (JACM), v.13 n.1, p.1-16, Jan. 1966
- ^ IBM System/360 Model 67 Functional Characteristics, Third Edition (February 1972), IBM publication GA27-2719-2
- ^ L.W. Comeau, "CP-40, the Origin of VM/370," Proceedings of SEAS AM82 (September 1982) p. 40 – Atlas "didn't work"
- ^ Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution, Gerrit A. Blaauw and Frederick P. Brooks, Addison-Wesley Professional, 1264 pp., February 1997, ISBN 978-0-201-10557-5
