peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) (08/06/90)
(thanks to Eugene Miya for the inspiration for this article) In article <881@bilver.UUCP> wbeebe@bilver.UUCP (Bill Beebe) writes: > To support assembler *and* Forthism, you could use the Harris chip (correct > me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's something like the RTX-2000). The Harris > chip, with it's instruction set Forth in hardware, would give you the best > of both worlds - of you're so inclined. Kind of hard to do that if you're writing a piece of commercial software intended for the IBM-PC and UNIX markets. But in the future, as CPU speed ceases to be a bottleneck, it may be reasonable to buy integrated hardware/software modules that talked to each other over a common bus (Ether, FDDI, or electrical backplane). So you'd buy Microsoft Windows in the form of a module with a graphics card, processor, RAM, and software in something ROMish. You'd use it like an X terminal plus window manager. You'd buy Word Perfect and it'd be another CPU that you plug into the bus. The only things on real disks would be your own data files, config info, and cheap software. Instead of having standards based on CPU type and O/S, they'd be based on backplane or network protocols. -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' +1 713 274 5180. 'U` <peter@ficc.ferranti.com>