The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
The article recounts the history of the 'Rekursiv,' a custom processor developed by the Scottish hi-fi company Linn in the 1980s that featured advanced object-oriented hardware capabilities. Though commercially unsuccessful at the time, its architectural concepts are now appearing in modern production silicon.
Why it matters
It illustrates how innovative hardware concepts can be ahead of their time, eventually becoming industry standards as economic and technological conditions evolve.
Somewhere at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde Canal , buried in the silt, there is a box of custom silicon that was right about almost everything.
Back in 1988 a Scottish hi-fi company shipped a processor that checked the type and bounds of every memory access in hardware, garbage-collected its own heap in silicon, and treated memory and disk as a single persistent object store. Retellings of the story make it out as charming folly, one where a company that made record turntables decided von Neumann was wrong.
Get smarter about the news
Sign up free for a feed built around what you actually care about, Dive Deeper research on any story, and the full text of every article.
Create free accountAlready have an account? Sign in