cocke

John Cocke and Fran Allen are responsible for the optimizing Fortran compiler and their technical report at IBM detailing and justifying the transformations is still excellent reading.

I know that John Cocke who invented the architecture (and was an old drinking buddy of mine) would definitely approve.

Superscalar machines first appeared in the floating point processor of the IBM 360/91 and may well be due to John Cocke (IBM) who generalized the notion.

I think John Cocke was working out the architecture of that line then.

It was supposed to be very exciting, very breakthrough, but unless John Cocke came and told you what they were doing, you couldn't figure out anything about it.

>The John Cocke Theory of Dreams was told to me, on the phone, late one night back in the early 1960’s.

From this[1] piece it seems the the original goal was indeed both: > Cocke and his team reduced the size of the instruction set, eliminating certain instructions that were seldom used.

Well, I can't stop you from using a nonstandard definition:-) The original definition of superscalar from Agerwala and Cocke of IBM was dispatching multiple instructions to the execution units every cycle.

Like the proverbial plate of shrimp, this stuff has been coming up a lot recently, so I've been researching and recombining ideas from Will's old talks about Spore and with Brian Eno, David MacKay's Dasher text input system, and I've also dug up some even older unpublished thoughts from Ed Fredkin and John Cocke about a Theory of Dreams, and how they relate to LLMs and compression.

"We knew we wanted a computer with a simple architecture and a set of simple instructions that could be executed in a single machine cycle—making the resulting machine significantly more efficient than possible with other, more complex computer designs," recalled Cocke in 1987.

The version in the article is based on Cocke's own comments but I'll add a note to clarify.

But it is nice to see history recognizing earlier pioneers in the field like John Cocke.

Cocke: Informal discussion on the IBM 801 mini-computer, U.