The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal: Why Linn Was Right About Everything
I explore the story of the Rekursiv, a visionary computer built by the hi-fi company Linn Products in the 1980s. Designed to run object-oriented code with hardware memory safety and garbage collection, it was ahead of its time. Though the project failed due to economic shifts and the rise of RISC, its core ideas are now shipping in production silicon from Arm, proving the original team was right about almost everything.
The story of the Rekursiv deserves to be more than just a curiosity, because almost forty years after it went into the water, its ideas are now shipping in production silicon from Arm.
- needSomeCoffee
Very interesting and well written article. This sentence in particular:
"Linn Products is the Glasgow company Ivor Tiefenbrun founded in 1972, and if you know it at all you know it for the Sondek LP12, still widely regarded by its partisans as the finest record deck ever made."
I was a big audiophile right at that time. Auditioned both Sondek and Sota Star Saphire. Went with the latter which I still proudly own (Alphason Tonearm). Note how carefully the author phrased "...by its partisans..." when describing the Sondek as the best. Nothing, not even programing code style zealots today can compare to audiophiles and their "take" on what made for the best playback. Pretty sure the author did not want to open that can of worms by simply declaring the Sondek the best.
Turntables back then were pretty damn detailed re: technology. Not surprised Linn could make a great computer (in the day).
HTH, NSC
- Taniwha
Thing is capability machines (like this and the 432 and lots of research machines) were very much the thing at the time - cutting edge even. The research literature was full of them. I did a paper design at the time.
What ate them up was "what can you fit all on a chip with not many pins", followed by "what can you fit along with a cache on a chip with more pins", things move so much faster if everything's on the same die.
Tagged architectures are old, Burroughs mainframes had them back in the 70s along with rudimentary hardware objects (pageable even)
- JSR_FDED
It’s crazy what a small group of smart people can achieve if they’re not captive to conventional wisdom.
They got crushed by the commodity curve and Moore’s Law. But still a great story - and thankfully written by a real person.
The author’s idea that the commodity curve is over and that hardware is now cheap enough to make special purpose hardware viable is intriguing. Standardization used to be important because you needed to convince scarce programmers to invest in the platform, but AI has ended the scarcity of programmers so dedicated purpose hardware is more viable than ever.
- inigyou
I wonder if you could throw a small microcontroller at the bottom of a canal, powered by water passing through a fan, to hide it. And why you would want to do that.
- scottconover
Website design comment: I love the orange/teal theme! Really drawn to the details such as illustrations carrying the orange/teal theme. Inspired me to re-color a project with this split complimentary color.