Documentation for the Amdahl 580 Computer, Vol. I

Description:

This red narrow ruled white paper single subject notebook contains documentation related to the Amdahl 580. There are 78 pages according to the page number count which means that two pages must have been removed from the notebook. All the notes are on one side of the page with the exception of the last page. The donor described the book as follows: "I have two spiral notebooks containing my hand-written notes completely describing the opeeration and diagnostics of the Amdahl 580."

The Amdahl 580 was a follow-on model to the Amdahl 470. In the donor's words: "The 580 is distinctive in a number of respects. First the core processors were roughly twice the speed of the competeting IBM models at a time when applications were often dispatched on a single processor even when the computer as a whole contained multiple processors. The other noteworthy aspect is that the 580 contained an additional abstraction layer for instruction execution. We called this macrocode. So, for example, if IBM introduced a new instruction op code in their operation system software that Amdahl had not implemented in hardware, the macrocode layer would intercept the machine check and simulate the function of the new op code."

Along with the Amdahl 470 V/8, it is probably one of the earliest examples of virtualization.

The donor worked for Amdahl Corporation from 1980 to 1988. He served primarily as a software systems engineer in Customer Support & Services but was additionally hardware cross-trained.