Kevin, I'll quote one of my earlier questions to the list - in it I had a few pointers that you might find a useful starting place. > In the videotaped presentation from HIPK > (http://www.bradfuller.com/squeak/Kay-HPIK_2011.mp4) you made reference to > the Burroughs 5000-series implementing capabilities.
There's also a more detailed set of influences / references to Bob Barton and the B* architectures in part 3 of the early history of smalltalk: http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_III.html "I liked the B5000 scheme, but Butler did not want to have to decode bytes, and pointed out that since an 8-bit byte had 256 total possibilities, what we should do is map different meanings onto different parts of the "instruction space." this would give us a "poor man's Huffman code" that would be both flexible and simple. All subsequent emulators at PARC used this general scheme." [Kay] You should take the time to read that entire essay, it's chock-full of great idea launching points :) Note that the Alto could simulate (I believe) 16 "instances". Not quite a full on bare metal VM the way VMware grossly virtualized an entire x86 system, but much more capable than what you'd call a hardware thread (e.g. processor cores or hyper threading). > Could you elaborate on how capabilities were structured, stored and processed > in the the B5000 series or point me to appropriate reading material? I've been able to find some good pointers to the B5000, like this gem: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/images/manuals/b5000/descrip/descrip.html and of course Barton's "A New approach to the Functional Design of a Digital Computer". Another approach in the same "style" of rich system design would be the whirlwind: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD694615&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf The part I still can't find info about is the B220 data tape program written by the air force officer that had its own bootstrapping code on how to read its data format (very Forth-esque). shawn > > Best regards, > > Kevin Jones > > P.S. - I really enjoy the work going on at VPRI. > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org (mailto:fonc@vpri.org) > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
