The master of the mainframe
When Gene Amdahl grew up on his family’s South Dakota farm, there was no electricity until he was in his teens. He attended a one-room school and did some of his boyhood chores behind a horsedriven plow.
He went on to become a high-tech visionary who was the chief architect of IBM’s mainframe computers and whose technological insights shaped the industry for decades to come.
Amdahl died this week in a Palo Alto, Calif., nursing facility. He was 92.
Amdahl, who had Alzheimer’s disease, died of pneumonia, said his son, Carl. “He was an inventor and a very intense thinker,” Carl Amdahl said. “He was really comfortable with a blank sheet of paper.”
An entrepreneur who ended up running a series of startups, Amdahl began his career at IBM Corp. In the early 1960s, he designed a series of big, revolutionary mainframe computers known as the System/360.
The effort has been described by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., as “a daring business and technical gamble that became one of the greatest success stories in the history of computing.”
IBM backed it with $5 billion (U.S.), much of it for five new factories to meet exploding demand.
The system represented a leap forward in data processing because it linked machines of different sizes and speeds with a common computing language — a feat that had not been achieved before.
“The impact of that development lives on,” the San Jose Mercury News said. “Some IBM mainframes continue to run on the series, while Amdahl’s achievements are integrally embedded into the smartphone and search-engine technologies of today.”
Born in Flandreau, S.D., on Nov. 16, 1922, Amdahl never wanted to follow his parents and homesteading grandparents into farming.
In high school, he was intrigued by science. He studied engineering physics at South Dakota State University and received a doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of Wisconsin.