3 ms·
Mesa, Interlisp, Smalltalk each had their own instruction sets, effectively VMs, which were written by hand. The D-machines' native instructions were wide words
by kps 13y ago
Mesa, Interlisp, Smalltalk each had their own instruction sets, effectively VMs, which were written by hand. The D-machines' native instructions were wide words with multiple dedicated timesliced hardware 'threads'. The interpreter ran in one 'thread' and core system functions, also handwritten, ran in the others. It's never turtles all the way down.
(I currently own a Dandetiger and two Daybreaks.)
- pjmlp 13y agoThanks for the info, I never saw one such system live, just a few papers about them, so some wrong info on my side. Still if those systems had become mainstream surely there would have been an investment making them run as fast as possible. After all, Hotspot is a consequence of an commercialization attempt of such systems.