Facilitator: Adrian Sampson
Where: Zoom

This reading group is about the ways computers might have been. The predominant ISAs in 2020 all owe a spiritual debt to the IBM System/360, from 1965, and the earliest von Neumann machines before it. But it didn't need to be this way—the history of architecture research is littered with completely different ideas for how to build and program machines. These papers embody alternative visions for the hardware–software interface.

Tips for reading historical papers:

• Read skeptically: from our vantage point, we can judge whether any of the futures that old papers envisioned actually came to pass.
• Try Google and Wikipedia to look for more historical context.
• Think broadly about contemporary work that feels descended from this foundational stuff.