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by jecel 1737 days ago
I always mention the Rekursiv in my talk about Smalltalk computers. Its problem was being a CISC in the era of RISC. The Manchester Mushroom from just a little later had initially the same problem but went through a major redesign when they saw the JIT compilers for Self on the Sun Sparc processor.
1 comments

I'd never heard of the Mushroom! Thank you for making me aware of it! A quick DDG search returned no results; I'd appreciate any links you have on the topic!

I'd also love to see your talk! Do you think a RISC Rekursiv could be achieved? What value, if any, do you think such might have in our current world?

This is the current Mushroom page:

http://www.wolczko.com/mushroom/

The slides for my 2019 talk about Smalltalk computers (in LibreOffice and PDF formats):

http://www.merlintec.com/download/2019_slides_jecel_fast1v2....

http://www.merlintec.com/download/2019_slides_jecel_fast1v2....

and the video (1 hour and 13 minutes):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tATpzsyC6OA

If you replace the Rekursiv's special microcode memory with a cache to allow microcode to live in main memory you will essentially have a RISC version of the machine. I have adopted this solution in several of my own designs.

Absolutely fascinating stuff! Thank you for the links, friend, and welcome to a highly-treasured spot on my hard drive; all of these materials are going directly to my ~/Research directory! Computer architectures are an area I'd love to enter when I'm more experienced, so these are an incredible source of inspiration.

I'm also deeply in love with the merlintec website. It's refreshing to see a website which has persisted since 1999(!), and without a lick of JavaScript it would seem!

Could I purchase a Merlin 6 or a Pegasus 2000?

Speaking of which, the way that the Pegasus 2000's eGUI documentation[1] is written is incredibly dear. The "world" and "heaven" analogies are great!