While most of the leading edge computer development effort seems to be concentrated on reduced instruction set architectures these days, an established Scottish hi-fi and computer applications company, Linn Products Ltd of Glasgow, gone off in the opposite direction, designing an object-oriented complex instruction set chip set around the Am29203 32-bit microcodable microprocessor. Aimed at artificial intelligence, computer-aided design and relational database applications, the Rekursiv computer implements the concept of the single-level store – main memory and disk – that is the key feature of IBM’s System 38. The new Linn Smart Computing Ltd company set up by Linn Products to exploit the Rek-rusiv describes the machine as having the world’s first object-oriented virtual memory. In an object-oriented system, the programmer is able to treat all logic and data elements – libraries, files and so forth, as members of different pre-defined classes of objects, and can write pro-grams to manipulate them without needing to know their size, or their contents in any detail. Linn claims that the Rekursiv will make it possible to implement object-oriented programming fast, efficiently and totally securely. The chip set, which is designed to microcoded for spec-ific applications rather than tied to a pre-determined instruction set, includes the object-oriented memory management chip – the key to the Re-kursiv machine; an Am29203 microprocessor, microsequencer, stack control frames and control stack interface. It also includes 2Mb of static RAM pre-allocated to specific tasks, and dynamic RAM main memory. The original parts are being manufactured for Linn by LSI Logic Corp. The company will initially offer the chip set on an OEM basis, making it available by the end of the year, following up with a co-processor board for use in engineering workstations early next year, and subsequently offer a networked computer system built around the set. No indication of prices were given. David Harland, who heads the Linn Smart Computing unit, has just been appointed Professor of Computer Architecture, Strathclyde University.
