From Newsgroup: comp.arch

But what I learned about her wasn't terribly important.
But along with that, I learned that before writing her book about
VLSI, she invented something at IBM. But she didn't get credit for
it...
However, I'm not at all sure just _what_ she invented.
I remember IBM's Future Systems project. James Martin went around
telling people how it would change the world. IBM ended up cancelling
the project as impractical... but they didn't throw all their work
away. Instead, it just got scaled down a bit, and the AS/400 did end
up as a real IBM project.
There was another IBM project that didn't come to fruition. IBM was
going to try to build a supercomputer as a prestige project. The first iteration of the Advanced Computer System was ACS-1, which was going
to have a new architecture; the second iteration, ACS-360, was going
to be compatible with the IBM/360.
IBM cancelled it, and Gene Amdahl was so unhappy, he left the company
and started Amdahl.
The important thing, though, is that the ACS project appears to have
come *after* the System/360 Model 91. You know, the one that embodied
the Tomasulo Algorithm. The one for which out-of-order... well, if you
don't count the 6600, of course, which Mitch Alsup will definitely
complain about.
Anyhow... perhaps it was *superscalar* and not OoO that Lynn Conway
invented during her work on ACS.
But I'm not exactly sure what she invented. Wikipedia named her
parentss at the time of her birth, so I had the surname part of her
deadname to help me in my efforts to search for old publications... it
didn't help.

John Savard
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