I didn't realize IBM would have went with the Motorola 68000 for the IBM personal computer if Motorola had been ready. That would have been awesome for me because I could have applied my Mac 68000 asm skills to the much larger IBM PC market.
Towards the end he talks about some general rules he has found for a happy life.
What Worked Well for Me [1] by David Patterson
• Maximize Personal Happiness vs. Personal Wealth
• Family First!
• Passion & Courage
- Swing for the fences vs. Bunt for singles
• Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate
• Winning as Team vs. Winning as Individual
- "No losers on a winning team, no winners on a losing team"
• Seek Out Honest Feedback & Learn From It
- Guaranteed Danger Sign: "I'm smartest person in the room"
• One (Big) Thing at a Time
- "It's not how many projects you start Its how many you finish"
• Natural Born Optimist
[1] Full video: see "Closing Remarks", www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/patterson2016
"Unfortunately, there was a time when compiler writers considered it important to get most programs right but not necessarily all programs. When the programmer used some legal features in unusual ways, the compiler might implement an incorrect version of the program. This gave optimizing compilers a bad name."
The first optimizing C compiler for DOS (using data flow analysis) was released as Datalight Optimum-C in the 1980s.
One of the programming magazines at the time decided to do a compiler roundup and prepared a number of benchmark programs. Optimum-C did incredibly well on them. The article writer did some investigating and concluded that Optimum-C cheated by deleting the benchmark code. We received a disastrous review.
The problem, though, was the benchmarks would do things like:
a = b + c;
a = b + c;
...
and the compiler correctly eliminated the dead assignments, and hence most of the benchmark. The other compiler vendors weren't fooled, however, and quickly added data flow analysis to their compilers, and the benchmark code was forced to change.
But that review hurt us badly. The author at least could have contacted us over the unusual results.
David Patterson - A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture: History, Challenges and Opportunities
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFT54hO1X8M
I didn't realize IBM would have went with the Motorola 68000 for the IBM personal computer if Motorola had been ready. That would have been awesome for me because I could have applied my Mac 68000 asm skills to the much larger IBM PC market.