I joined IBM after college, summer of '68, spent six months in various classes before joining the OS/360 System Design Department as a junior programmer. Bill Collier was one of the instructors, an amazing/brilliant motivated and motivating teacher. Coincidentally, I very recently saw a reference to an IBM colleague's obituary Bill wrote, that led me to some posts from Bill, which led me to Bill.
Here's the Web page I found, it's stories from Stretch/Harvest, a couple of notable S/360 predecessors: http://users.bestweb.net/~collier/sh/stories.html -- with the obit I mentioned first. When I knew him, Ken Plambeck was a towering/imposing senior programmer who "owned" OS control blocks -- that is, he allocated fields in them to deserving projects and programmers. Some of what Bill said to me: My time at IBM was spent pursuing the problems of parallelism. The difference between single threaded code vs multithreaded code is like the difference between hiking on a trail and bushwacking. I got a book out of it, Reasoning About Parallel Architectures, and, after leaving, my own company, Multiprocessor Diagnostics (www.mpdiag.com). Mike Myers said: The behavior was documented in a technical report called "OS/360 Coding Notes" by a brilliant IBMer named Bill Collier. -- Gabriel Goldberg, Computers and Publishing, Inc. (703) 204-0433 3401 Silver Maple Place, Falls Church, VA 22042 [email protected] LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gabegold ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
