Re: BiiN system

[emery@grebyn.com (David Emery)]

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In article <dewar.837604422@schonberg>, dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) wrote:

> Dave said
> 
> "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."
> 
> I disagree, it was not ahead of its time, it was behind its time. It
> represented a trend in CISC design thinking that at this stage I think
> has been effectively discredited.

I don't think that the CISC/RISC debate is anywhere near over yet.  After
all, RBKD has often posted notes about how difficult it is to generate good
code for "modern" RISC architectures.

In particular, it's not clear to me that the underlying notion of Capability
has been discredited.  The beauty of the BiiN system was not the hardware
or the software, but the System that�came from the combination.  In particular,
the system did a wonderful job with two specific areas, Security and Network
computing, that haven't been particularly solved by other technologies.  
And the BiiN design also provided substantial support for system fault
tolerance, another area where we don't have the "final word" yet.  

Incidentally, the BiiN architecture lives on in variants of the i960
chips that have been fairly widely used in avionics...


               dave