3 ms·
I wrote a lot of code on a Meiko computing surface in Occam in the late 1980s! Was very hard to get even simple algorithms to run.
by 2sk21 6y ago
I wrote a lot of code on a Meiko computing surface in Occam in the late 1980s! Was very hard to get even simple algorithms to run.
- therealcamino 6y agoI never wrote any nontrivial Occam programs, but I took a class around that time in which we wrote Occam code for a 4-Transputer PC add-in board. I remember being excited to try it, and afterwards feeling like "How could you get this to do something useful?" It seemed ambitious, but to me it felt like the programming model was more about having firm theoretical foundations in CSP, than ease of writing programs.
- 2sk21 6y agoI was working towards my PhD in machine learning with neural networks in 1990 and I tried to implement backpropagation in Occam in 1989. But gave up and tried using C* on a Connection machine instead. That did not work out well either so I finally wrote a simple C based implementation that ran distributed on a cluster of IBM RS 6000 workstations ( very well I might add) :-) Parallel computers of the late 80s were a mixed bag - they worked well for a few use cases but in general, they were troublesome and getting access was difficult and expensive.