History: How did Forth get its stacks 4025

at one point, the follow-on to 4341 was going to be 801-based microprocessor ... in fact there was whole corporate effort to migrate the large variety of corporate microprocessors to 801. endicott got a brandnew multi-story brick building that housed much of the effort (up until then most of the facility looked like converted warehouses). i help with white paper that end 801-based microprocessor for the 4341-following (the 4381).

i've claimed that a lot of early 801 effort could be construed as a reaction to go to the exact opposite extreme of the FS effort

i.e. extreme hardware simplicity instead of extreme hardware complexity. i've mentioned before an internal advanced technology conference in pok in the mid-70s ... where we were presenting "logical machine" project (16-way smp using 158 engines) and the 801 group was presenting risc, CPr, PL.8, stuff.

that earlier effort is finally taking hold (replacing plethora of internal microprocessors with 801s) ... as-400 has gone 801 (power-pc), and lots of the "embedded" processors are being done with 801.

I have an old proposal i did dated 8mar85 breastle "VLSI Processor clusters" ... with rack drawers with large number of boards (almost blades except they were installed on more of an "all slot" backplane within the drawers). It proposed abritarily intermixing boards with 5mip 370 Roman chip sets (done in Boeblingen) with boards having 801 chips (possibly blue illiad, first 32bit 801 that was never finished). Cooling was a big configuration issue.

for a little more drift ... another cluster scale-up activity