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Title: The Legend of Amdahl by Jeffrey L. Rodengen, Jon Vanzile ISBN: 0-945903-19-7 Publisher: Write Stuff Enterprises Pub. Date: 01 August, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $39.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (2 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: Not much substance; a valentine to Amdahl management
Comment: For over twenty years, Amdahl Corp was a great place to design and build interesting computers.

This book captures little of what made it great, and ignores or glosses over the joys, the problems, and the challenges that were central to the Amdahl experience as it was lived. Instead, the author gives a lifeless, through-the-gauze-lens account that reads like a compilation of Amdahl PR releases and internal newsletters.

The most glaring omission is the complete absence of any mention of Amdahl's ill-fated "Key Computing" venture -- a $350 million boondoggle that sapped the company's resources at the exact instant that Amdahl faced the make-or-break challenge of precipitously-declining price/performance in the mainframe market.

Also missing and missed:

- A recounting of the company's near-death experience with the 580 ("Oslo").

- Any indication that the company might have successfully continued as a competetive mainframe supplier, if it had made the bipolar-to-CMOS technology transition in step with IBM. The 5990M ("Joshua", later "Sona"), an ECL machine that required elaborate power and cooling arrangements, was much more expensive to manufacture than IBM's competing CMOS machine.

- Any hint of any downside to the relationship with Fujitsu.

Finally, I was disappointed by the choice of photographs. Amdahl was above all a *community* of outstanding people, and that community is conspicuous by its absence from these pages. The photos chosen for inclusion lean heavily toward the most stiffly-posed of glossy PR shots -- few former employees will go misty-eyed with nostalgia over these shots, because almost none of the people who made the place what it was appear. Every photograph of professional models standing before the newest box seems to me a wasted opportunity to actually tell the story promised in the title.

A telling detail: in the days when Amdahl Corp actually was a computer-industry legend, the company was known by its all-lower-case logo, often represented as

a m d a h l

The editors chose instead for this book's cover the "new" logo, the one adopted after Fujitsu took over, after everything that a person could love in the organization had died.

There's an Amdahl story that deserves to be told. This book doesn't tell it.

the other Joel

Rating: 4
Summary: Not a lot of information, but presented very well.
Comment: This book is a good overview of the history of Amdahl Corporation. I found the early chapters the most interesting. 30 years ago Gene Amdahl left a big company (IBM) to form a start-up and compete with IBM in one of their strongest businesses. Anyone with an interest in the history of the computer industry will certainly enjoy the first half of the book. Amdahl's idea of making a computer that was software compatible with IBM's was unique at the time. I was somewhat surprised by the number of business principles and technical innovations that can be directly attributed to Gene Amdahl and the early days of Amdahl Corporation. I've worked at Amdahl for 14 years. So, maybe it's the fact that I lived through the events in the second half of the book that made it much less interesting. It's not too bad. But, it doesn't have the historical interest or significance that the first half does. The author interviewed a lot of current and former managers. Some of the stories they tell are good. However, the problems the company suffered are barely touched on. The book makes it seem like the company management was prepared for the changes in the industry instead of clobbered by them. All things considered, I liked the book. I would have liked a little more detail, but it was a pretty easy read and has an extensive list of references in the back. The author did a very good job researching the material and I didn't find any major errors. I also enjoyed the many photographs. Several have historical interest, although a few seem to be there only to shorten the word count. I did notice that one aerial photo was reversed and a picture of a teamserver was mistakenly labeled as a Millennium 830 Mainframe.