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sebastianconcpt

Most beautiful computer syntax of the world.

Smalltalk is conceptual-centric in ways that are remarkably deep.

Pity our hardware architectures couldn't give us better hardware support.

Not that they didn't tried:

- Burroughs B5000 (1961)

- Intel iAPX 432 (1981–1986)

- BiiN project (1985–1990)

- Intel i960

- Rekursiv (Linn)

- jHISC ~2005

- MOOSS 2003

- Structural Object Processor (Xilinx)

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Burroughs Large System (aka B5000-B8500) still (virtually) exist as Unisys Clearpath MCP. You could download a VM if you wanted to try it (I assume you still can).

BiiN and i960 are sorta the same thing to the extent that Intel took the BiiN work after that project died and commercialized it as the i960. Unfortunately, except for the early i960MC, XA & XM versions, Intel was busy stripping feature out of it to make an embedded processor instead of making use of the really cool parts. What might have been...

Alongside updated manuals for NEWP, one of the very first (almost) memory safe systems programming languages, and probably the one that introduced the concept of unsafe code blocks (JOVIAL doesn't seem to have had them).

What is the Structural Object Processor?

Another hardware project was MUSHROOM [1]

[1] https://www.wolczko.com/mushroom/index.html

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