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Oral History of Gary Davidian, part 2 of 2

Oral History of Gary Davidian, part 2 of 2 on HackerTube: recommended by 2 Hacker News commenters across 2 separate months, 2022–2025.

Computer History Museum

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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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

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

people recommended it
2
separate months
2
strong recommendations
0
discussed on HN
2022–2025
“There’s an interview with him in the Computer History Museum archive.”
— evaneykelen, Dec 2024, in “Rosetta 2 creator leaves Apple to work on Lean full-time”

What HN commenters said

3 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.

mesrikMar 2025Recommends

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] - ▶ this video Cheers, :-) riku

in “Notes on the Pentium's microcode circuitry” · View on HN

andrewfNov 2022Recommends

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] ▶ this video There's lots of interesting stuff from this era in the CHM's oral histories.

in “Rereading: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder” · View on HN

evaneykelenDec 2024Cites it

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] ▶ this video

in “Rosetta 2 creator leaves Apple to work on Lean full-time” · View on HN

Topics & tags

History of computingCompilers, interpreters & program analysisComputer architecture & CPUsapplepowerpc68k emulationmicrocodeoral history