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Hub AI
Rekursiv AI simulator
(@Rekursiv_simulator)
Hub AI
Rekursiv AI simulator
(@Rekursiv_simulator)
Rekursiv
Rekursiv was a computer processor designed by David M. Harland in the mid-1980s at a division of hi-fi manufacturer Linn Products. It was one of the few computer architectures intended to implement object-oriented concepts directly in hardware, a form of high-level language computer architecture. The Rekursiv operated directly on objects rather than bits, nibbles, bytes and words. Virtual memory was used as a persistent object store and unusually, the processor instruction set supported recursion (hence the name).
By the time the project had delivered its first implementation, new processors like the Sun SPARC and Intel 486 had surpassed its performance, and development was abandoned in 1988.
The Rekursiv project started as an effort to improve the assembly line controls in Linn's factories in Glasgow, Scotland. Their lines were automated using a suite of VAX-11 systems, but these were slow and very difficult to program with the flexibility that Linn's founder, Ivor Tiefenbrun, desired. By the early 1980s, Tiefenbrun had become convinced that object-oriented programming would offer solutions to these problems.
In 1981, Tiefenbrun hired a number of programmers to write a version of the Smalltalk language for the VAX systems, borrowing some syntax from ALGOL. Known as LINGO, the system worked but ran very slowly on the VAX platform. Tiefenbrun concluded the solution to the performance issue was not to improve the language on the VAX but instead produce an entirely new CPU dedicated specifically to running object programs.
In 1984, Tiefenbrun formed the wholly owned subsidiary Linn Smart Computing under the direction of University of Strathclyde professor David Harland and the Rekursiv project was born. The first version of the system emerged in 1988. A small number of prototype VMEbus boards, called Hades, comprising these four chips plus 80 MB of RAM were produced. These were intended for installation in a host system such as a Sun-3 workstation. Although the Rekursiv was never fully developed and was not a commercial success, several Hades boards were used in academic research projects in the UK. The last known copy of a Rekursiv computer ended up at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde canal in Glasgow.
According to a post by a researcher at the University of Strathclyde, while the Rekursiv system was being developed, a new version of the LINGO language was written for the Sun SPARC system which emerged at about this time. It ran twice as fast as the Rekursiv hardware, rendering the effort pointless. Sometime after that the company was shut down.
The underlying concept of the Rekursiv platform was to provide a hardware-assisted persistent object store, constantly and invisibly writing the memory state to disk without intervention from the operating system or the user's program. One reviewer described it as "an object-database engine for creating and managing persistent objects".
To make such a system work with reasonable performance while running complex programs, Rekursiv was designed to allow the programmer to write their own instruction set architecture (ISA) dedicated to the language they were using. The microcode instruction set was stored in static RAM. There was no default ISA, although Linn supplied one for running programs in the C programming language.
Rekursiv
Rekursiv was a computer processor designed by David M. Harland in the mid-1980s at a division of hi-fi manufacturer Linn Products. It was one of the few computer architectures intended to implement object-oriented concepts directly in hardware, a form of high-level language computer architecture. The Rekursiv operated directly on objects rather than bits, nibbles, bytes and words. Virtual memory was used as a persistent object store and unusually, the processor instruction set supported recursion (hence the name).
By the time the project had delivered its first implementation, new processors like the Sun SPARC and Intel 486 had surpassed its performance, and development was abandoned in 1988.
The Rekursiv project started as an effort to improve the assembly line controls in Linn's factories in Glasgow, Scotland. Their lines were automated using a suite of VAX-11 systems, but these were slow and very difficult to program with the flexibility that Linn's founder, Ivor Tiefenbrun, desired. By the early 1980s, Tiefenbrun had become convinced that object-oriented programming would offer solutions to these problems.
In 1981, Tiefenbrun hired a number of programmers to write a version of the Smalltalk language for the VAX systems, borrowing some syntax from ALGOL. Known as LINGO, the system worked but ran very slowly on the VAX platform. Tiefenbrun concluded the solution to the performance issue was not to improve the language on the VAX but instead produce an entirely new CPU dedicated specifically to running object programs.
In 1984, Tiefenbrun formed the wholly owned subsidiary Linn Smart Computing under the direction of University of Strathclyde professor David Harland and the Rekursiv project was born. The first version of the system emerged in 1988. A small number of prototype VMEbus boards, called Hades, comprising these four chips plus 80 MB of RAM were produced. These were intended for installation in a host system such as a Sun-3 workstation. Although the Rekursiv was never fully developed and was not a commercial success, several Hades boards were used in academic research projects in the UK. The last known copy of a Rekursiv computer ended up at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde canal in Glasgow.
According to a post by a researcher at the University of Strathclyde, while the Rekursiv system was being developed, a new version of the LINGO language was written for the Sun SPARC system which emerged at about this time. It ran twice as fast as the Rekursiv hardware, rendering the effort pointless. Sometime after that the company was shut down.
The underlying concept of the Rekursiv platform was to provide a hardware-assisted persistent object store, constantly and invisibly writing the memory state to disk without intervention from the operating system or the user's program. One reviewer described it as "an object-database engine for creating and managing persistent objects".
To make such a system work with reasonable performance while running complex programs, Rekursiv was designed to allow the programmer to write their own instruction set architecture (ISA) dedicated to the language they were using. The microcode instruction set was stored in static RAM. There was no default ISA, although Linn supplied one for running programs in the C programming language.