
Rekursiv - rachitnigam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rekursiv
======
orf
> Linn had finally overreached its finances and the project was clearly at
> risk, but the finalstraw was a Linn delivery driver called Shug. He reversed
> into Davids Porsche and Ivorunwisely decided that, since the incident had
> happened on private ground, Linn werentresponsible and wouldnt pay for the
> repairs. David quit and "chucked all that I had in theway of bits and bobs
> of hardware into the Forth and Clyde Canal."

Hah!

~~~
eps
Ivorunwisely = Ivor (Founder of Linn) unwisely

------
fractallyte
David Harland is a _very interesting_ person. Why would a professor of
computer science at St Andrews University suddenly drop out of computing
entirely, and move to writing about space exploration? It turns out he has
strong opinions about the state of modern computing:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8217780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8217780)

~~~
emmelaich
My prejudice is that any "audiophile" (see Linn) and anyone associated with
them is a bit ... _interesting_

------
detaro
the linked source document is a fun read:
[https://www.slideshare.net/sebrose/rekursiv](https://www.slideshare.net/sebrose/rekursiv)

~~~
fourthark
Here is the one technical bit, the rest is a very entertaining job story.

> 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."

~~~
arethuza
"users could program different instruction sets"

High-Level Hardware Orions could also do this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion)

------
protomyth
Byte had an article about it in the November 1988 issue
[https://archive.org/details/byte-1988-11-next](https://archive.org/details/byte-1988-11-next)

This would be the issue that showed the NeXT cube.

------
retrocryptid
This is, of course, complete hearsay, but Tim Rowledge (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=timrowledge](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=timrowledge)
) told me once that the Recursiv processor was used in a prototype british
"smart torpedo." The official story was the CPU locked up during a test and
the torpedoes have never been seen since.

------
ggm
[http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/rekursiv/](http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/rekursiv/)

------
andyjohnson0
> The project originated in an initiative within the hi-fi manufacturer Linn
> Products to improve its manufacturing automation systems, which at the time
> ran on a DEC VAX minicomputer. This resulted in the design of Lingo, an
> object-oriented programming language derived from Smalltalk and ALGOL. Due
> to the poor performance of Lingo on the VAX, a subsidiary company, Linn
> Smart Computing Ltd., was formed to develop a new processor to efficiently
> run Lingo.

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.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_\(computer\))

------
cmrdporcupine
I have the book they wrote up about this machine.

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.

~~~
scroot
Also the book is hilariously written. Very dry humor throughout. Definitely an
interesting read.

------
ggm
[http://www.merlintec.com/old-self-
interest/msg00259.html](http://www.merlintec.com/old-self-
interest/msg00259.html)

------
Thorentis
> the processor instruction set supported recursion

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?

~~~
13of40
It would be interesting to learn a little bit more about what this means. X86
"supports recursion" in the sense that it has a stack and the push, call, ret,
syscall, etc. instructions make use of it.

~~~
notfashion
A bit of googling led to this document:
[https://www.academia.edu/5256838/Rekursiv_an_object-
_oriente...](https://www.academia.edu/5256838/Rekursiv_an_object-
_oriented_cpu)

~~~
saagarjha
Unfortunately that link goes to an error page for me :(

~~~
igouy
This seems to work

[https://www.academia.edu/5256838/](https://www.academia.edu/5256838/)

------
arethuza
I applied for a job working on Rekursiv in late '87 - never did hear anything
back from my application...

------
vincnetas
Link to pdf of magazine with article. Without need to login to linked in.
Search for "Getting REKURSIV" article

[https://accu.org/var/uploads/journals/CVu213.pdf](https://accu.org/var/uploads/journals/CVu213.pdf)

------
ggm
[https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.281981](https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.281981)

------
twic
But does it run TaOS?

------
lukasb
"Due to the poor performance of Lingo on the VAX, a subsidiary company, Linn
Smart Computing Ltd., was formed to develop a new processor to efficiently run
Lingo."

y tho

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Why not?

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. :)

~~~
jacobush
_" if they were to build a computer system that would run Lingo fast enough
they would rule the world i.e. corner the CIM market"_

Others had similar ideas about inventory and object oriented languages:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient_Overseas_Container_Line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient_Overseas_Container_Line)

