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Oral History of Gary Davidian, part 2 of 2

Computer History Museum2 HN recommenders · 2022–2025
2K views · interview · evergreen · Uploaded 2019-09-13

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.

Pointed to as a primary-source interview on Apple's architecture transitions, emulation and microcode work.

History of computingCompilers, interpreters & program analysisComputer architecture & CPUs

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3 comments from Hacker News

@andrewf2022 · in “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] [VIDEO] There's lots of interesting stuff from this era in the CHM's oral histories.

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@evaneykelen2024 · in “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] [VIDEO]

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@mesrik2025 · in “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] - [VIDEO] Cheers, :-) riku

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