

Designing a .NET Computer - daeken
http://daeken.com/designing-a-net-computer

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rbanffy
"Remember the Intel 432" seems in order.

Ah... BTW, also give a look to Lisp machines made by Symbolics, LMI and Texas
Instruments.

And, when you feel like it, google for the Smalltalk machines made by Xerox,
Tektronix...

Either that or, to quote George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it"

~~~
daeken
I've done a lot of research into Lisp machines and a little bit into Smalltalk
machines (Renraku is a spiritual successor to the Lisp machines of yore), but
I'm seeing this is more of a joining of the Jazelle Java acceleration on ARM
and the managed OS work in Renraku.

That said, for the nitty gritty details, such things are certainly the place
to look. They've solved many of the problems already.

~~~
rbanffy
Did you check those monsters from Azul Systems? They are doing some
interesting Java stuff on more or less bare hardware

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dkersten
Its worth mentioning the _Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present_
website[1], especially the section on _Weird and Innovative Chips_ [2]. Some
very interesting designs in there and some interesting history overall.

Completely opposite of a crazy CISC machine, but just as interesting, is the
Transputer T-9000[3]. They actually produced processors which could be slotted
together to form vast, highly parallel, arrays of simple processing nodes.
Think of the TILE64[4], but where the tiles are separate units, allowing you
to add more over time.

[1] <http://jbayko.sasktelwebsite.net/cpu.html>

[2] <http://jbayko.sasktelwebsite.net/cpu7.html>

[3] <http://jbayko.sasktelwebsite.net/cpu7.html#Sec7Part5>

[4] <http://www.tilera.com/products/processors.php>

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jbellis
Less-known than it deserves to be: <http://www.azulsystems.com/> has been
selling Java computers (with almost 1000 cores) for several years now.

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HeyLaughingBoy
Why?

I mean in some contexts it made sense historically. There were the Lisp
machines someone already mentioned. I've used the 8052AH-BASIC: an Intel 8052
microcontroller with a built in BASIC interpreter, and there were a few small
chips that booted into a Forth interpreter. But those were controller-oriented
microprocessors in a time when compilers (and silicon in general) were
expensive, so it made sense to build a chip with its own language, especially
when it would find application in a product with a lifetime measured in
decades.

But in 2009? Besides raising a host of upgrade problems, why would you do
this?

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lt
I'm guessing it would run cosmos.

<http://www.gocosmos.org/>

~~~
dkersten
While Cosmos is interesting for the same reasons Singularity is interesting -
and I'm very much in favour of any OS which tries to focus on security,
verifiability and correctness - from my little knowledge of the system, it
doesn't really seem _different_ enough. Theres countless toy, research and
hobby OS projects out there, some more ambitious than others, and few truly
try to innovate. Now, I'm not very familiar with Cosmos, so its unlikely that
I'm giving them enough credit and I apologise for that.

What I want to see is an operating system which forgets all the technologies
which were a great idea 20 years ago, but may not be so suited to todays
computing world. We have a lot of computing power available to us now, so we
can try some truely innovative idea cheaply and easily. I want to see highly
extensible systems, applications which are hugely parallel from kernel up, I
want to see orthogonal persistence, I want a system which can determine what
applications to run for me, so that I dont have to and can simply focus on the
task at hand - getting work done. I dont ever want to have to think about
filesystems and directory structures again. I want to be able to see the
internals of the running system in a REPL, if I so choose. If I'm using, say,
an instant messenger and I'm typing text, I want to be able to use vim (or
whatever your favourite editor is) to edit that text!

Ok, some of these may not be great ideas or very realistic - the point I'm
trying to make is that I want to see operating systems truely try to achieve
something different in an end-user (ie not simply for research) OS.

This is the type of system I envision to run on such a computer, were it to
exist!

End of Rant ;-)

