It is a great interview. What I love about these stories is the revelation of the human effort to develop a threading system for I/O that is not an operating system, The all operating systems ride on top of the universal threading.
Imagine all the human hours that stretches back decades trying to develop this single model of computing.
I'm starting to believe that oral history and tradition is what moves the world along. All the written texts are transient. What we pass directly to each generation is our continuity of culture.
other prominent multithreaded cpus have included the lincoln lab tx-2 on which the first graphical interface was developed (with cad, constraint programming, and windows), the cdc 6600 'peripheral processor', the xerox alto, the tera mta, and the higher-end padauk microcontrollers including the pmc251, which cost 10½¢ https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontroller-Units-MC...
some current intel and amd parts also support 'hyperthreading', but as i understand it they sometimes run many instructions from the same thread sequentially, unlike the others mentioned above (except the padauk pmc251), and they are limited to 2 or 4 threads, again unlike the others mentioned except the pmc251
i'm a little unclear on the extent to which current gpu hardware supports this kind of every-clock-cycle alternation between different instruction streams; does anyone know?
I really like the context switching. I spend a lot time trying to think about big universal circuits for a 100 computer. The context switching provides universalness to the processing I find irresistible.
I want to make big furniture size circuits for living environments. This family of chips represent about the most complication I want to consider. I could have the largest circuit create symbols through a busy board interface. The symbols would be understood at a human level and could also be monitored by more complex computing processes.
Agreed, unfortunately too many don't pay attention to our short computing history, and the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth, while some cool technologies keep falling adoption, only to be reinvented in a worse way.
