Demography?

From: Doug Yowza <yowza_at_yowza.com>
Date: Sun Mar 1 17:14:07 1998

On Sun, 1 Mar 1998, Captain Napalm wrote:

> Writable control stores: Don't count these out just yet. The new HP
> machines based upon the HP-PA stuff does have a writable control store. My
> friend has one of these boxes at home and he's been planning on playing
> around with this.

I've heard that even Pentiums will let you patch their microcode, but the
idea as a general theme seems to be dead. I don't know the reason for
this except for speed and cost issues.

> OO-architectues: While interesting, they have the problem of being slower
> than their non-OO counterparts (in the same era). The Intel 432 sounds
> interesting, but from what I hear, it made for a slow system. But again,
> don't count this as being dead as Sun has made CPUs that run Java natively
> (or rather, the JVM, which enforces the OO paradigm).

True, some people are condemned to repeat history, but I'm willing to bet
that hardware byte-code engines will be pulled back into the tar pit
before they leave the cave at Sun (and other places). I listed to a talk
given by a Sun engineer on why they should build these things, and the
reasons he gave (such as byte-code is more compact than other code) are
really hard to buy. Defintely a solution looking for a problem.

> Give some of these things time. They typically don't hit mainstream until
> 20, 25 years after being first introduced.
>
> -spc (Java is just another variation on UCSD Pascal ... )

True again. p-Code made more sense then (when there was more than one
dominant architecture) than Java does now, but if Sun ever buys into the
idea of Java compiled to native code, there still may be more hope for
Java than there was for UCSD Pascal.

-- Doug
Received on Sun Mar 01 1998 - 17:14:07 GMT