Thanks. Yes, I was pretty proud of what we built. We had two orders of magnitude price-performance advantage over the state of the art for about a year, but before we could get any significant market share, gigabit ethernet came along (and the price of fast ethernet dropped) and that wiped us out. But it was fun while it lasted.
The hardware kind of exists. I have two prototype boards in my closet but they haven't been powered on in 30 years. I also don't know where the code for the device drivers is any more, though I have a box full of old hard drives that probably has it somewhere. Maybe some digital archeologist will dig it up some day.
To give proper credit where it is due, the idea and hardware design for Flownet were the work of Mike Ciholas, who went on to found a very successful hardware design company [1]. I wrote the device drivers and did the marketing, which is probably one of the reasons we failed. Turns out I'm terrible at marketing.
Well, there are probably a couple of old timers on HN who really appreciate the kind of skill that it took, even though it doesn't show in your bank balance.
It also makes me very grateful for the magic that goes on behind the scenes whenever I plug in a high speed USB device and it 'just works', the kind of wizardry involved for this sort of thing is highly underappreciated.
Very true. Ironically, my career has come full-circle and I am now working for Intel doing chip design (actually working on developing tools that do chip design). The process of producing modern state-of-the-art chips is truly mind-blowing.
I watched that 'indistinguishable from magic' video and that is indeed the only appropriate way to describe it, and if our base tech would not improve from this point forward I'd say that is a job well done.
But I also have a soft spot for the GA144, which represents the other extreme, it's what one man can do versus what a whole team of talented engineers can do.
Is your work related in any way to Symbolics NS, beyond using the same language? Maybe you're reusing some public knowledge from the papers that were published about it?
Is your team hiring? I'm working at Intel, though far from hardware design - in the MPI library's team. In my spare time I learned Common Lisp and some basics of hardware design, so I would be happy to make my hobbies relevant to my job and work with you.
The hardware kind of exists. I have two prototype boards in my closet but they haven't been powered on in 30 years. I also don't know where the code for the device drivers is any more, though I have a box full of old hard drives that probably has it somewhere. Maybe some digital archeologist will dig it up some day.
To give proper credit where it is due, the idea and hardware design for Flownet were the work of Mike Ciholas, who went on to found a very successful hardware design company [1]. I wrote the device drivers and did the marketing, which is probably one of the reasons we failed. Turns out I'm terrible at marketing.
[1] https://www.ciholas.com/