At the beginning I said I didn't think the Alto Architecture is better than current approaches. The main reasons are the things that Alto did not have:

• No virtual memory or any memory protection


• No executive mode, to support a trusted operating system or contain untrusted code


• No virtualization capability


• No parallelism


• No caches

As a consequence of the... See more

The Alto was fabulously efficient because its approach to how its real CPU (the microcode engine) interacted with the available memory bandwidth (including the use of multiple program counters for zero overhead low-level task switching and avoiding interrupts).

Whereas the commercial CPU architectures had very poor notions of how to use memory and... See more

Twitter is sometimes very, very good in a serious way https://t.co/zXGond7WhM

"Should you learn C to "learn how the computer works"?" great piece from Steve Klabnik that touches on C's history and C's abstract machine, just don't get baited by the article name https://t.co/a2GNlkroLM