Beautiful Teams

The Initial Team

While sitting in my cubicle in the same area as the members of the HADS team, I was able to observe the initial work of the team. The start-up was anything but promising.

Tom and Dave were the DDC-I consultants working on the project; Tom had been the project leader for the DDC-I I960 project. Among other things, Dave had played a vital role in one of the most difficult parts of the code generation process: the task of making efficient use of the registers on the hardware. None of the Honeywell engineers had any experience with building compilers other than perhaps in a class in school. Tom was not initially the project leader for the HADS project, but was always closely consulted.

Aside from setting up initial schedules, the first major task was to analyze the differences between the Intel I960 and the AMD 29050 to try to understand what pieces of the previous project could be retained, what could be modified slightly, and what would need to be completely rewritten. Engineers from Honeywell were to do this work with consulting help from Tom and Dave. Chris was to analyze the architecture differences that affected linking. John was to look at the architectural impact on exception management. Cynthia looked at linking issues. Waleen looked at storage management issues. Ajit looked at issues related to Ada tasking. Ajit also looked into issues related to what is called the User Configurable Code, since it interfaces closely with the scheduling portion of Ada tasking. ...