I neglected to note in my last entry that Redpine Signals has put a lot of effort into not just low-power radios, but also processor architectures, which aren’t usually thought of as key to success in wireless. After all, computers are, well, just computers, right? Well, not so fast there, bucko. Today’s in fact a special day, just perfect for a little history lesson.
We hearken back to, as a former boss once phrased it, the days of iron men and wooden computers, in this case to this very date, April first, 1957. It was on that day that Dr. Ian MacDonald, Senior Scientist in IBM’s Oxford (England) Research Lab (the Cambridge Research Lab having been in the USA, after all) published what was, at the time, a little-known and at least slightly obscure paper on the equally little-known and highly-obscure field of computer architecture. Dr. MacDonald, by the way, was at the time IBM’s oldest active employee – at age 94 he was still found in his lab almost every day. He joined IBM’s predecessor, the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation, in 1913, a mere two years after its founding and stayed with the firm through its eventual transformation into IBM, pursuing a wide variety of research interests, particularly in computing (he often said that tabulating and recording were at best enormous bores, irritating his bosses to no end).
Anyway, that paper from 1957 described what Dr. MacDonald called the Four-Address Register-Memory (FARM, cleverly enough) architecture, and which turned out to be the first 64-bit architecture. It featured a number of technical innovations, breakthroughs, really, including the first use of direct memory access (DMA), known at the time as Enhanced I/O or EIO. Dr. MacDonald’s key innovation here was to allow I/O devices to be directly mapped into memory, a feature he called Extended Interface EIO. Most of the innovations described in this paper still survive today, and are, in fact, key to processors used in mobile applications.
Believe it or not, this work was later memorialized in song, in a tune that essentially every nursery-school pupil knows by heart today. So the next time you’re about to make a call, perhaps just a little hum of that classic would be in order, to do honor to a great man and the little piece of him inside your handset.
OK, everybody – Old MacDonald had a FARM, EIEIO…
