Just a moment...
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:
As a consequence of the... See more
- 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
Just a moment...
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
Whereas the commercial CPU architectures had very poor notions of how to use memory and... See more
Just a moment...
shannon invented digital circuit design as a Masters student in 1937. invented information theory ~10 years later
a typical phd student in 2024 ends up writing an esoteric thesis about a corner of the world almost no one will ever know exists
why don't people think big anymore
Jack Morrisx.com
