On 20-01-2013, at 12:52 PM, "David T. Lewis" <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
>> All I can say is thank goodness that the ATT 'Hobbit' processor never took off, with that insane middle-endian nonsense.
>> 
> 

> I was assuming that this was a joke, riffing on "Middle Earth". It certainly
> sounded like a joke ... but googling "hobbit processor" seems to indicate
> it was real. Maybe real *and* a joke :)

Indeed, both. I note that the wikipedia page is, as so often the case, wrong - wrong! - about what happened wrt the Active Book. ABC did not swap to using the Hobbit, the company was bought by ATT and essentially killed off with some of the staff taken on by EO as support personnel.
The Active Book (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/bibuxton/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=158) was cancelled. I ended up at ParcPlace.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Any program that runs right is obsolete.