On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, Tim Rowledge wrote:

> SUN tried at least acouple of times for java nad seem to have failed.
> SOAR was not very effective, Sword/32 failed, iAPX432 was a dog, etc
> etc.

I worked for a while on the REKURSIV project (a microcoded chipset for oo
languages) that did GC, binding, etc. -- the whole kaboodle -- in h/w.  
(Even the microcode talked about objects.)  It was hosted by a Sun3 (it
plugged directly into the backplane).  It had its own language called
Lingo.  While waiting for the hardware somebody implemented an interpreter
in C.  By the time Lingo ran on the hardware, the interpreter (running on
a Sun3) was faster than Lingo running on the hardware.

	The front-end was out-performing the mainframe.

To misquote (severely) Eliot Miranda: the portable (software) version was
faster than the platform-specific (hardware) version by virtue of its
portability.

That's enough irrelevance for one day...  Over and out,

Ian