TECHNOLOGY

Gene Amdahl, Pioneer of Mainframe Computing, Dies at 92

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Gene Amdahl at home in Saratoga, Calif., in 1979. As a young computer scientist at IBM, Dr. Amdahl, who has a formula named after him, played a crucial role in the development of the System/360 series. Mickey Pfleger 
Gene Amdahl, a trailblazer in the design of IBM’s mainframe computers, which became the central nervous system for businesses large and small throughout the world, died Tuesday night at a nursing home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 92.
His wife, Marian, said the cause was pneumonia. He had been treated for Alzheimer’s disease for about five years, she said.
Dr. Amdahl rose from South Dakota farm country, where he attended a one-room school without electricity, to become the epitome of a generation of computer pioneers who combined intellectual brilliance, managerial skill and entrepreneurial vigor to fuel the early growth of the industry.
As a young computer scientist at International Business Machines Corporation in the early 1960s, he played a crucial role in the development of the System/360 series, the most successful line of mainframe computers in IBM’s history. Its architecture influenced computer design for years to come.
The 360 series was not one computer but a family of compatible machines. Computers in the series used processors of different speeds and power, yet all understood a common language.
This allowed customers to purchase a smaller system knowing they could migrate to a larger, more powerful machine if their needs grew, without reprogramming the application software. IBM’s current mainframes can still run some System/360 applications.
The system was announced at IBM’s annual shareholders meeting on April 7, 1964, in Endicott, N.Y., a village near Binghamton where the company had opened a facility early in the 20th century.
At the meeting, Thomas J. Watson Jr., then chairman and chief executive, singled out Dr. Amdahl as the “father” of the new computer. “I remember it very clearly,” Marian Amdahl said in an interview. “Gene was so proud of that.”
Michael J. Flynn, a computer scientist at Stanford University and former colleague of Dr. Amdahl’s at IBM, said the 360 series “set the design philosophy for computers for the next 50 years, and to this day it’s still out there, which is incredible.”
“This same instruction set,” he added, “is still bringing in billions of dollars for IBM.”
Dr. Amdahl is remembered at IBM as an intellectual leader who could get different strong-minded groups to reach agreement on technical issues.
“By sheer intellectual force, plus some argument and banging on the table, he maintained architectural consistency across six engineering teams,” said Frederick P. Brooks Jr., a computer scientist who was the project manager of the System/360 and is now at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
The System/360 series, the most successful line of mainframe computers in IBM’s history.Jim McKnight/Associated Press. 
Dr. Amdahl’s business instincts and ambitions manifested themselves in 1970, when he left IBM to build a company to rival it. At the time, the market for mainframe computers belonged almost exclusively to IBM.
With funding from Fujitsu, he formed the Amdahl Corporation, setting up offices in Sunnyvale, Calif.
“We took about three weeks to do an analysis of the formidable task of competing head-on with IBM,” Dr. Amdahl said in a 2007 interview with Solid-State Circuits Society News.
His idea was to build machines compatible with hardware and software for the System/370, the successor to the System/360. He pointedly named it the 470 series, and in 1975 his company shipped the first of the machines. It proved faster and less expensive than IBM’s comparable computers.
By purchasing an Amdahl computer and so-called plug-compatible peripheral devices from third-party manufacturers, customers could now run System/370 programs without buying IBM hardware.
The Amdahl Corporation was not the first to make IBM-compatible computers, but it managed to compete successfully against IBM where large companies like RCA and General Electric had failed.
Amdahl also benefited from antitrust settlements between IBM and the Justice Department, which required IBM to make its mainframe software available to competitors.
By 1979, the year Dr. Amdahl left the company to start another venture, Amdahl had more than $200 million in annual revenue and 22 percent of the mainframe market.
(Fujitsu bought the remaining interest in Amdahl in 1997 and made it a wholly owned subsidiary. It has since been dissolved as a stand-alone entity.)
Dr. Amdahl also formulated what became known as Amdahl’s Law, which is used in parallel computing to predict the theoretical maximum improvement in speed using multiple processors.
Gene Myron Amdahl was born on Nov. 16, 1922, in Flandreau, S.D., to parents of Norwegian and Swedish descent. He grew up on a farm and attended a one-room school through the eighth grade. Rural electrification did not reach his town until he was a freshman in high school.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, he tried to join the military, but the Selective Service turned him down, deeming his farming skills more important. “They’d drafted so many of the youth that there weren’t enough people to harvest,” he told an interviewer in 1989.
Dr. Amdahl finally joined the service, the Navy, in 1944, and taught radar at naval training centers around the country. In 1946 he married Marian Quissell, who grew up on a farm four miles from his.
He received his bachelor’s degree in 1948 from South Dakota State University, in Brookings, where his wife worked as a secretary. She had dropped out of Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D., after her freshman year to go to work to help pay for her husband’s education. In 1952 he received his doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
It was in graduate school that his interest in the nascent field of digital computers took root. For his Ph.D. thesis, he drafted a design for what became known as the Wisconsin Integrally Synchronized Computer, or W.I.S.C., an early digital computer.
Dr. Amdahl was recruited by IBM after a branch manager in Madison visited him at the university and offered him a job straight out of graduate school.
After the success of the System/360 project, Dr. Amdahl moved to California in 1964, weary of what he described as “the time and politicking demands” at IBM’s corporate headquarters in Armonk, N.Y. In California, he managed an IBM engineering laboratory for six years before starting Amdahl in Sunnyvale, in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Dr. Amdahl also encountered both technical and business disappointments. One was Trilogy Systems, which he created after leaving Amdahl in 1979. Trilogy set out to build an integrated chip that would allow mainframe manufacturers to build computers at lower costs. It raised more than $200 million in public and private financing. Yet the chip development ultimately failed.
In 1987 Dr. Amdahl started the Andor Corporation, hoping to compete in the midsize mainframe market using improved manufacturing techniques. But the company encountered production problems, which, together with strong competition, led it to bankruptcy in 1995.
Besides his wife, Dr. Amdahl is survived by two daughters, Delaine Amdahl and Andrea Amdahl; a son, Carlton, who was vice chairman of Trilogy; a brother, Lowell; and five grandchildren.
Despite his business failures later in life, Mr. Amdahl’s reputation for technical brilliance endured. Dag Spicer, senior curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., compared him to two of the industry’s greatest computer architects.
“He’s always been right up there with Seymour Cray or Steve Wozniak,” Mr. Spicer said, “with real cachet in the technical community.”
A version of this article appears in print on November 13, 2015, on page B15 of the New York edition with the headline: Gene Amdahl, Known at IBM as the Father of the Mainframe, Dies at 92 . Order Reprints|  Today's Paper|Subscribe