Oral History of Gary Davidian, part 2 of 2
Why Hacker News recommends it
Pointed to as a primary-source interview on Apple's architecture transitions, emulation and microcode work.
What it is
Part two of a Computer History Museum oral history with Gary Davidian, covering his work on the 68000 emulator for PowerPC at Apple, Power Computing, clean-room contracting and later performance optimization work. It is nearly three hours long.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2022 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends andrewf · 2022-11 · on “Rereading: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder”
You might be interested in this Computer History Museum oral history of Gary Davidian, who among other things (1) worked on the "rival project" from Soul (2) was hired by NEC to bolster their lawsuit defense by writing microcode for the Intel 8086 (3) wrote the 680x0 emulator Apple launched their PowerPC line with. Transcript: [LINK] [LINK] Video: [LINK] [this video] There's lots of interesting stuff from this era in the CHM's oral histories.
Recommends mesrik · 2025-03 · on “Notes on the Pentium's microcode circuitry”
Hi Ken, Nice article. While reading I remembered that I watched some time ago the Oral History of Gary Davidian and he was quite bit involved with microcoding. And if I were you I would try asking him if he could be able to give you some ideas where to get more information about microcode workings and development. Here are links to that interview, if you have time to watch it. It's in two parts. - [LINK] - [this video] Cheers, :-) riku
Cites evaneykelen · 2024-12 · on “Rosetta 2 creator leaves Apple to work on Lean full-time”
In a previous discussion the name of Gary Davidian is mentioned who also — initialy single-handed — did amazing work on architecture changes at Apple. There’s an interview with him in the Computer History Museum archive. [LINK] [this video]