Annals of OS and network history

From: William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net>
Date: Tue Mar 10 09:20:44 1998

> 3)Have there been any machines that made extensive use of a truly
> unusual architecture?

Yes. Lots. Most of the time the weird architectures could be found on very
old machines (standard joke - everything was done in the 1950s) and reborn
later on. For example, the upcoming Merced, while being trumpetted as
truely revolutionary, uses some of the dataflow techniques found in the
few old Multiflow Trace supercomputers. In general, the unusual stuff dies
early.

> What I am looking for is twofold: I am
> interested if anything ever used a neural network-like arrangement,
> and I am interested in something that had a processor that
> interacted w/the user and a separate one to do the processing

IBM mainframes (actually most mainframes) work this way. The users use the
I/O processors more than the central processors, except when the big batch
jobs are run.

William Donzelli
william_at_ans.net
Received on Tue Mar 10 1998 - 09:20:44 GMT