>>>>> "Allen" == Allen Wirfs-Brock <Allen_Wirfs-Brock at Instantiations.com> writes:

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

The i860 was a family of processors.  The KA was simple integer math,
the KB added floating point, the MC added military-grade compatibility
and the XA (the chip used by BiiN) was the 432-reborn (hence the code
name "phoenix" before BiiN).

The XA had hardware support as an Object Machine, with opaque object
handles and full inheritance and capabilities.  It was quite nice and
secure.  A class could return an instance, and you couldn't even look
inside that instance... all you could do is call methods which called
back to the class.

I wrote the Intel i860XA Architecture Manual (essentially the chip
spec).  The doc project was over budget and behind schedule... I was
called in, scrapped everything I saw, started from scratch, and hit
the original deadline!  (My OO experience far exceeded the previous
techwriter, so I actually "got" the purpose of the chip, and that
helped.) I still have a copy of the XA manual here on my sample shelf
in my office.

Now for the secret that can be told a decade later.  The initial 860
series from KA to XA were all the same chip on one die.  Every
function was tested completely on every chip, and then in the final
stage a different label was put on the chip, varying the price from
$30 to $350. :) Eventually, there was die differentation, but I found
it amusing that someone could pay an order of magnitude more simply
for a label change.

And for another twist of fate, I was also employed by Sequent
(employee #64), which was started by Casey Powell after he walked out
of the Intel 432 project muttering "we should do this thing with
commodity hardware instead of inventing everything from scratch".  So
I worked on *both* major derivatives of the failed 432 project. :)

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