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Greenarrays comes to mind, it's a Forth-oriented chip: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23142322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23142322 The article

Greenarrays comes to mind, it's a Forth-oriented chip: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23142322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23142322 The article doesn't really mention transputers, which were existent at the time and were remarkably similar in vision, with parallel multiprocessing, hardware network links, the Occam language, a ground-up Helios OS, and custom graphics card (Blossom, which would lead to the VGA standard). Having a 3-element hardware stack somewhat restricts the use of languages on it - I imagine that Occam is similar to Forth in operation?

aredox 2y ago
Oh, thanks, I had forgotten about those crazy forthers (forthists? forthians?)!
- aeonik 2y ago
  Goth -> Gothic Therefore Forth -> Forthic
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    North -> Norsemen Forth -> Forsemen (The less gendered "Fordlander" is also acceptable)
- aeonik 2y ago
  Also, Forthsider, from the Firth of Forth?
ssrc 2y ago
Occam looks like a concurrent Pascal, not like a Forth. The transputer had a 3-element hardware stack but it was used more like a cache for the workspace (kind of the memory stack). You can still find around the manual "Transputer Instruction Set - a compiler writer's guide" that explains how you would do that (section 5.3 Expression Evaluation). Apart from Occam, there where C, C++ and Fortran compilers. Targeting the transputer is not more difficult than any other stack machine (like the JVM, the .Net CLR, CPython or Pascal p-code). The weird/interesting thing about the transputer is that it is also an operating system: two task queues (high/low priority), preemptive scheduling and communication through channels (that can be one of the 4 serial ports or memory based).