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Peter Hunsberger wrote:
>On 5/4/05, Rich Salz <rsalz@datapower.com> wrote:
>
>
>>>management, but then again, I was only peripherally aware of the
>>>Microdata. How is that you stumbled across it?
>>>
>>>
>>They were all over the small business market in the early 1980's.
>>Look for Pick operating system.
>>
>>
>
>I recall Pick (though I wouldn't have made the connection); if I
>remember correctly they had implementations on various pieces of
>hardware, including IBM BM which was where I mainly worked at the
>time. ..
>
>The real question was the possibility of hardware/microcode assist ?
>
>
>
when i was at unsw in the late 70's there was a lot of work being done
on associative memory as a different way to organise disks. the
microcode in the drive was programmed. i didn't hear much about it after
i left, but as far as i know it did work and quite well.
i think the real problem, and the same problem beset efforts at
non-turing cpu architectures (also tried extensively at the time) and
probably caused the ultimate demise of things like pick etc is that the
world became a place where general purpose computing was needed more
than any other sort. why dedicate parts of the hardware to one software
paradigm when a good general purpose os like unix could make it possible
for many paradigms to exist on the one machine?
non-turing architecures went the way of non-binary switches - people
just can't think well enough that way, so we go back to the comfort zone.
xml must derive some of it's success from the fact that it can sit on
top of many architectures and therefore coexist with many things (like
databases). i'd suggest the way forward is more of the same, not an
architecural shift.
rick
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