The other machines that I think of as being the siblings of the Tandem are the Nova (a lovely instruction set crippled by its shitty OS), the HP 3000, and of course the byte-addressed PDP-11. Despite their differences they all have a very similar flavor, reflecting a CISCy Zeitgeist when minicomputers were just beginning to cut their umbilical cords to PDP-10s and the like.
Tera’s first machine was bipolar (ECL I assume) and they finally squeezed out a CMOS successor with a lot of assistance from their EDA vendor. Never knew the story of why moving to CMOS was so urgent.
Amusingly, it was the Beowulf list where someone converted me to the Tera religion (rgb I think). I was convinced that was the way all computers would work soon. And, well, it's how GPUs work, kind of. But mostly I was wrong.
Not sure I agree about modularity. Galaxies, mammalian bodies, trees, bacterial films, cars, books, and river systems are modular. It would be surprising if we could make software non-modular. But we could make it only as modular as a tree.
I am happy you don't agree on modularity. I don't want to be correct, I want to arrive at correct conclusions. :)
Composition is great, scale free self similarity is probably the basis for the universe.
Modularity is a great design technique, it can also make things weaker and force other (unknowable) design choices because the module boundary prevents the flow of information/force. Overly constrained modular systems encourage globals, under constrained modular systems are asymptotic to mud/clay.
I don't want to use K8S as a strawman to attack modularity, but I think it is an example of using this powerful design tool to solve the wrong problem using mis-applied methods all the while being more complex and using more resources. In the case of designing systems, modules/objects/processes (Erlang sense) are critical, but not so much in building/engineering them. Demodularizing or fusing a design can make it more robust and more efficient.
I don't dislike modularity, I just think it is a bigger more complex topic than most give it credit for. Unix is highly-non modular and very poor composition. It sits on a molehill of a local maximum, itself sitting in the bottom of a Caldera, a sort of Wizard Mt on Wizard Island.
Other things you might like is the research around "Collapsing Towers of Interpreters" [1]
Or Dave Ackley's T2 Tile Project and Robust First Computing [2]
Would love to chat more, but internet access is spotty for the next week, non-replies are not ignores.
Tera’s first machine was bipolar (ECL I assume) and they finally squeezed out a CMOS successor with a lot of assistance from their EDA vendor. Never knew the story of why moving to CMOS was so urgent.
Amusingly, it was the Beowulf list where someone converted me to the Tera religion (rgb I think). I was convinced that was the way all computers would work soon. And, well, it's how GPUs work, kind of. But mostly I was wrong.
Not sure I agree about modularity. Galaxies, mammalian bodies, trees, bacterial films, cars, books, and river systems are modular. It would be surprising if we could make software non-modular. But we could make it only as modular as a tree.