Re: BiiN system

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <emery-1607962036250001@line200.nwm.mindlink.net>,
David Emery <emery@grebyn.com> wrote:
>
>With 20-20 hindsite, the BiiN machine would have been a perfect platform for
>"modern" OO languages, such as Ada95, C++ or Eiffel.  It's a damn shame
>that the corporation couldn't make it work.  
>
>               dave

I took a 3-day course from Intel on the 432, back around 1982. I still
have docs from that course. The Ada compiler developed for that chipset
was _most_ interesting. It was VMS-hosted, 432-targeted, and pre-Ada 83.
Had some really interesting OO features that also happened to take
advantage of the 432 architecture.

Much of the 432 Ada compiler team was picked up by Verdix when Intel
dropped the 432. That group became the core of the Verdix Ada compiler
team; some are still at it, now under the Rational umbrella.

Somewhere in my morass of papers I have a brief description of the
432 Ada language. I'll pull it out one of these days. Would it be
useful - and legal - to put it in electronic form and get it on the
net as an interesting discussion piece?

Mike Feldman