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RIP Danny Cohen: The computer scientist who gave world endianness meets his end aged 81
The computer scientist who created the first visual flight simulator, gave us the compsci concept of endianness and whose pioneering work blazed a trail for modern VOIP services has died at the age of 81.
Dr Danny Cohen worked on one of the first ever computer-based flight simulations in the early 1970s, an era where most think of computing as something that was still reliant on punch cards instead of advanced graphics processing and display technologies.
In addition, Cohen gave us the compsci notion of endianness and developed some of the first clustered computing deployments – paving the way for modern cloud technology.
The flight simulator created by the Israeli-born mathematician is very basic by modern standards but wouldn't be bested by generally available software until the advent of home gaming consoles more than a decade later.
What made his flight sim achievements even more remarkable was that it wasn't until after he developed the simulator that Cohen learned to fly in real life, as he told Wired in a 2012 interview.
Cohen also carried out some early work on what he described as "digital voice teleconferencing" in 1978, as this Youtube video published from an account seemingly in Cohen's name sets out.
[...] The Internet Hall of Fame inducted him into their ranks in 2012, recognising him as a pioneer.
[...] Danny Cohen, computer scientist. 9 December 1937 – 12 August 2019.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday August 21 2019, @12:54PM (3 children)
Neither. One is small, the other is far away... :-)
Seriously: big-endian is the most significant byte first. If it bothers you, just draw your computer's memory map upside down...
(Score: 1) by noelhenson on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:11PM (2 children)
The endianedness of byte ordering is important the underlying architecture of the CPU core. Big-endian is more human readable as one reads bytes in memory Eg. hex dumps; which I don't thing programmers do much today. I recently had to give a long-time programmer a quick lesson on what hexadecimal was and what it meant. Little-endian makes for a simpler ALU in the CPU core; especially in the old days of 8- and 16-bit CPUs. This is because of add/subtract carry/borrow bits - it would allow for the next byte to be fetched while the add/subtract was being performed while the program counter was simply incremented to index the next byte in memory.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 21 2019, @04:01PM
Oh how I remember using TMON on Classic Mac (68000 processors). (a low level debugger with amazingly high level features)
How nice it was that HEX was easily read because it was, unbeknownst to me, Big-endian.
A few years later . . . Wow! Intel is DOING IT WRONG! Or so I thought. Later, I came to realize the advantages of Little-endian.
My how far things have come!
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday August 22 2019, @08:24AM
How is it less of an issue with 32-bit (+) CPUs?