"At the time my dad started designing computers, while working on his Ph.D. in physics, there of course were no computers available to him," said his son, Carl, a retired tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist. "So he basically designed computers to facilitate the work he was doing, which says a lot about him. He was a highly creative and talented man and he was basically starting with a blank sheet of paper -- that`s a rare sort of genius."
After joining IBM in the early 1960s, Amdahl designed a collection of mainframes called the IBM System/360 series, which became the keystone for the dawning computer industry.
The sweet spot of the 360 series was that it enabled a grouping of different machines to process data at various levels of power and speed, all orchestrated by a common computing language. The impact of that development lives on: 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.
As Amdahl`s son put it, the 360 "was the first large-scale system that had an architecture consistent across multiple platforms, so you could now write software for the smallest computer that would also run on the largest. We see that today in the world of the PC where the same applications run across many generations of computers.`"
Amdahl died on Tuesday at a nursing home in Palo Alto. The cause, said his wife, Marian, was pneumonia. He had been treated for Alzheimer`s disease for about five years.
"It was a blessing,`" Marian Amdahl told this newspaper on Saturday.
She described her husband as a devout Christian. "He had suffered from Alzheimer`s and then pneumonia," she said. "It was hard for me to see him in such pain. The Lord was kind and took him home.``
""Born in 1922 to immigrant parents of Norwegian and Swedish descent and raised on a farm in Flandreau, South Dakota, Amdahl may have inherited some of his father`s DIY genes.
Asked during a 2000 interview for the Computer History Museum what sort of work he did as a boy on the farm, Amdahl said that his dad did most of the equipment repairs, "but I observed a lot of it done. My father was really very inventive. I remember in the Depression years, we had to paint the barn, and he couldn`t afford the paint. So what he did was he got Portland Cement and ocher for color, and skim milk mixed up as paint, and it worked very well.``
After taking classes in a one-room school with no electricity, Amdahl eventually joined the Navy in 1944, teaching radar at training centers around the country including Treasure Island. Two years later, he married Marian Quissell, who grew up on a farm four miles from his family home. Amdahl completed a degree in engineering physics at South Dakota State University in 1948, going on to study theoretical physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he completed his doctorate in 1952. With a thesis titled "A Logical Design of an Intermediate Speed Digital Computer,`" he created his first computer and then went straight to a well-paid position at IBM in the summer of 1952, his first of two career stints at Big Blue.
"He was one of the smartest people who has ever worked in Silicon Valley,`` said Michael S. Malone, a well-known tech author and journalist who has covered Silicon Valley for more than 25 years. "If you ever talked to Gene, you got the feeling he was simultaneously talking to you while also solving gigantic problems in his head. Gene would pause between words as if his brain were multiprocessing different bits of information.``
At an IBM shareholders meeting in 1964, then-chairman and CEO Thomas J. Watson Jr.
called Amdahl the "father" of the new computer. "I remember it very clearly," Marian Amdahl told the New York Times in an interview. "Gene was so proud of that."
After "basically inventing the computer," Malone said, Amdahl started his own company in 1970 and he was "so good that he turns around and takes on IBM, which is utterly astounding. People today forget how powerful IBM was around the world at the time. And Amdahl went right at them -- and he pulled it off."
After the huge successes of the Amdahl Corporation in Sunnyvale, Amdahl stumbled with his 1979 launch of new computing firm, Trilogy Systems. Malone said Amdahl`s life at this point "was almost a Greek story of hubris -- he does Trilogy, and it`s a complete bomb."
Adding to his problems with Trilogy, Amdahl`s life took another bad turn.
As described by Myron Magnet in a 1986 article in Fortune magazine, as Amdahl was "driving the forest-green Rolls he had bought when Rolls-Royce`s jet engine company chose an Amdahl computer, Amdahl collided with a motorcycle and killed its driver. The emotional turmoil and the need to defend a civil damage suit kept his mind focused on more than Trilogy."
According to the article, "Amdahl pleaded nolo contendere to a charge of misdemeanor manslaughter, and his insurance companies settled the civil suit out of court for an undisclosed sum."
Soon after that, heavy rains turned "Trilogy`s building site into an equipment-devouring sea of mud, delaying construction of the chip-making plant for months," Magnet wrote. "Worse, water had seeped into the bearings of the air-conditioning system as it was being installed. They rusted out once the plant was operating, the system stopped filtering air, and dust ruined semiconductors that had to be kept superclean. Figuring out what was wrong took five months."
The misfortunes conspired against Amdahl until he was finally forced to admit defeat.
"The failure tore him to pieces," the writer said. "A rigid, rectitudinous South Dakota farm boy whose intense manner, thick wavy hair, and stubborn dimpled chin give him the look of an evangelical Kirk Douglas, he couldn`t come to terms with it.``
Losing much of the personal wealth his groundbreaking work had brought him, Amdahl said at the time that "so many people invested because I had my name on it. I feel responsible. I get haunted by guilt feelings. I sort of cringe when I see my acquaintances.
That was a bruise -- a real bruise that hasn`t healed yet. And I don`t know that it ever will."
Besides his wife and son, Amdahl is survived by two daughters, Delaine Amdahl and Andrea Amdahl; a brother, Lowell; and five grandchildren.
Malone said Saturday that many people in Silicon Valley might be surprised to hear Amdahl had died, figuring he had passed away years ago. "He was a protean figure," Malone said, "but Silicon Valley doesn`t have a lot of memory and Gene just sort of fell off the radar at some point.
"He`d become so invisible," Malone said. "You just assume all these early pioneers like Gene were already long gone."
