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Right, Wirth's group used to build their own machines. The previous Modula-2 machine (Lilith) was a microcoded 16-bit system built from SSI/MSI 74-series TTL co
by johndoe0815 5y ago
Right, Wirth's group used to build their own machines. The previous Modula-2 machine (Lilith) was a microcoded 16-bit system built from SSI/MSI 74-series TTL components whereas the Ceres family of workstations used different CPUs and support chips from the NS32k family - the final version (Ceres 3) used a low-cost embedded version of the NS32k without an MMU (you don't need one for a type-safe language - that was at least the motivation for this...). It could run diskless and boot over a proprietary network, which used the same hardware (Zilog Z8530 SCC) as Apple's Localtalk in Macs (but a different protocol, I think).
An FPGA reimplementation of the Ceres would be great to have. Someone already did the hard work and implemented a NS32k soft core - http://www.cpu-ns32k.net/index.html http://www.cpu-ns32k.net/index.html
The old edition of the Project Oberon book that described the NS32k version is a bit hard to find. But it's interesting to see how little has changed between the versions.