At 02:24 PM 3/18/2003 -0800, Alan Kay wrote:

>>Though to be fair, Intel did have the iAPX432 (even if it
>>has been purged from their official history).
>
>This was the "omelette to clean the pan" -- as with most of these 
>attempts, the first one tries to optimize too many things before there is 
>enough actual programming experience (we were extremely fortunate at PARC 
>that we had already buried our learning curve mistakes in the 60s, so PARC 
>was "phase 2"). The 432 was a bad architecture -- but it's too bad that 
>Intel didn't try to do this again with a simpler more powerful POV.


Actually, I believe that they did. However, it also failed. Intel form a 
joint venture with (I think) Siemens call Biin that was essentially a 
follow on to the 432 work.  My understanding is that the i860 processor 
family came out of that effort after Biin, itself was aborted.  The i860 
was a RISC based processor that ended up being mostly used in embedded 
applications.  However, if you looked closely at the architecture there 
were strange and interesting features that, if enabled, would be useful in 
building a capability based system.

Allen Wirfs-Brock