OT: Language for the ages

[Patrick Finnegan]

William Donzelli declared on Saturday 15 October 2005 02:07 pm:
> > Hmm, interesting. In what ways other than the processor-memory model
> > could things have evolved in the early years? It'd be intersting to
> > speculate where computing might be today if it had evolved down some
> > totally different path very early on...
>
> How about the model with memory and processor being one? The "closest"
> production machines like this were probably the CM-1 and CM-2. Maybe
> some neural network machines in the labs will finally hit the point
> when they get useful. Or to really get wild, perhaps quantum machines
> or those that work on probablities?
>
> Processor-memory and analog were the easiest (by far) to implement
> years ago, so that is why they were there, and the above weird
> technologies were not. 30 years from now, some of those weird
> technologies may be quite normal.

A couple of years ago, Cray was working on a proposal for a DARPA grant, 
one of the ideas they were playing with in the design of the machine 
included memory-local processor, sort of like NUMA, except the memory 
modules themselves had processors that you could send 'tasks' to, sort 
of a vector of processors (as opposed to a vector processor:).

Pat
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