Rekursiv
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Hah!
> 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."
High-Level Hardware Orions could also do this:
This would be the issue that showed the NeXT cube.
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.
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.
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?
y tho
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. :)
Others had similar ideas about inventory and object oriented languages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient_Overseas_Container_Line