6 ms·
Rekursiv
- detaro 7y agothe linked source document is a fun read: https://www.slideshare.net/sebrose/rekursiv https://www.slideshare.net/sebrose/rekursiv
- fourthark 7y agoHere is the one technical bit, the rest is a very entertaining job story. > The thing about the REKURSIV was that users could program different instruction sets. James Lothian, who was worked at Edinburgh University microcoding the Prolog instruction set describes it as being "a really interesting and unusual design: the main memory was in effect a persistent object store, with every object having its type, size and position in memory known in hardware, so that (for example) the hardware could prevent you from 'running off the end of an array and corrupting surrounding memory. Paging of objects into and out of main memory was handled by the host machine (generally a Sun 3), and was completely transparent, even at the microcode level. This meant that you could write arbitrarily complex algorithms in microcode, even recursive ones, hence the machine's name. Every object had a unique identifier (a 40-bit number), and the MMU chip would translate that into the object's store address (if it was in main memory). Since only the MMU knew the object's address, an object could be moved around in memory without having to update references to it (since they were in terms of its object number); this made garbage-collection particularly straightforward."
- arethuza 7y ago"users could program different instruction sets" High-Level Hardware Orions could also do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion
- boznz 7y agoFunniest read all year.
- lukasb 7y ago"Due to the poor performance of Lingo on the VAX, a subsidiary company, Linn Smart Computing Ltd., was formed to develop a new processor to efficiently run Lingo." y tho
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoWhy not? Ivor is well known for being single minded and opinionated. He'd proved his heretical and opinionated point about turntables against the general industry view in the sixties, and built a successful and highly profitable business on the back of it. From nothing. From all I've read and heard of him, it's just the sort of thing I might expect. :)
- jacobush 7y ago"if they were to build a computer system that would run Lingo fast enough they would rule the world i.e. corner the CIM market" Others had similar ideas about inventory and object oriented languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient_Overseas_Container_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient_Overseas_Container_Line
- Thorentis 7y ago> the processor instruction set supported recursion I think that's one of the most interesting parts. It would be interesting to see this implemented in a more general processor's instruction set (like x86). I wonder how much performance boost there would be in some algorithms if you could compile down to a set that included a recursive instruction?
- 13of40 7y agoIt would be interesting to learn a little bit more about what this means. X86 "supports recursion" in the sense that it has a stack and the push, call, ret, syscall, etc. instructions make use of it.
- notfashion 7y agoA bit of googling led to this document: https://www.academia.edu/5256838/Rekursiv_an_object-_oriented_cpu https://www.academia.edu/5256838/Rekursiv_an_object-_oriente...
- saagarjha 7y agoUnfortunately that link goes to an error page for me :(
- igouy 7y agoThis seems to work https://www.academia.edu/5256838/ https://www.academia.edu/5256838/
- KineticLensman 7y agoI read the paper, which includes a forward reference to Figure 1 (the system architecture). When I got to the end of the paper, it says that Figure 1 is "TO BE SENT SEPARATELY BY MAIL, TOGETHER WITH A PHOTO OF ONE OF THE CUSTOM CHIPS". Oh well.
- zik 7y agoIt supported recursion in its microcode which is very unusual.
- cmrdporcupine 7y agoI have the book they wrote up about this machine. I keep meaning to go back and look at it and see how practical it would be to write up an emulator or an implementation on FPGA. But the absence of any software to run on it for testing would make it tricky.
- scroot 7y agoAlso the book is hilariously written. Very dry humor throughout. Definitely an interesting read.
- orf 7y ago> Linn had finally overreached its finances and the project was clearly at risk, but the finalstraw was a Linn delivery driver called Shug. He reversed into Davids Porsche and Ivorunwisely decided that, since the incident had happened on private ground, Linn werentresponsible and wouldnt pay for the repairs. David quit and "chucked all that I had in theway of bits and bobs of hardware into the Forth and Clyde Canal." Hah!
- Stratoscope 7y agoI guess that makes this the Doves Type of computer architectures: https://www.google.com/search?q=doves+type https://www.google.com/search?q=doves+type
- eps 7y agoIvorunwisely = Ivor (Founder of Linn) unwisely
- retrocryptid 7y agoThis is, of course, complete hearsay, but Tim Rowledge ( https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=timrowledge https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=timrowledge ) told me once that the Recursiv processor was used in a prototype british "smart torpedo." The official story was the CPU locked up during a test and the torpedoes have never been seen since.
- protomyth 7y agoByte had an article about it in the November 1988 issue https://archive.org/details/byte-1988-11-next https://archive.org/details/byte-1988-11-next This would be the issue that showed the NeXT cube.
- fractallyte 7y agoDavid Harland is a very interesting person. Why would a professor of computer science at St Andrews University suddenly drop out of computing entirely, and move to writing about space exploration? It turns out he has strong opinions about the state of modern computing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8217780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8217780
- emmelaich 7y agoMy prejudice is that any "audiophile" (see Linn) and anyone associated with them is a bit ... interesting
- vincnetas 7y agoLink to pdf of magazine with article. Without need to login to linked in. Search for "Getting REKURSIV" article https://accu.org/var/uploads/journals/CVu213.pdf https://accu.org/var/uploads/journals/CVu213.pdf
- ggm 7y agohttps://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.281981 https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.281981
- ggm 7y agohttp://www.merlintec.com/old-self-interest/msg00259.html http://www.merlintec.com/old-self-interest/msg00259.html
- ggm 7y agohttp://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/rekursiv/ http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/rekursiv/
- arethuza 7y agoI applied for a job working on Rekursiv in late '87 - never did hear anything back from my application...
- twic 7y agoBut does it run TaOS?
- andyjohnson0 7y ago> The project originated in an initiative within the hi-fi manufacturer Linn Products to improve its manufacturing automation systems, which at the time ran on a DEC VAX minicomputer. This resulted in the design of Lingo, an object-oriented programming language derived from Smalltalk and ALGOL. Due to the poor performance of Lingo on the VAX, a subsidiary company, Linn Smart Computing Ltd., was formed to develop a new processor to efficiently run Lingo. This brought to mind the J. Lyons & Co. (a 1950s UK restaurant chain and food manufacturer) who built the LEO computer [1] to run their own business, and ended-up manufacturing them as the first computer designed for business use. A big departure from their main business. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)