Yes, I think its cool too; I've not been able to do more than read about Self, but having raided the old Sun site a few months ago, it seems like a very clean and fun language. Also persused the old Merlin stuff, and I am anxious to see what kind of system(s) you may produce.

Dave -- didn't you end up working on Sun's "HotSpot" Java compiler?

Jason Karney (jason@netgenics.com)

Cool!

• Dave

...

Hi, friends!

I've been without internet access for the past couple of weeks and am only now catching up with my email, including the discussions on this list.

I thought you might be interested to know that I am typing this from the offices of "Merlin Computer Technology", the first company dedicated to producing hardware implementations of Self. We hope to be selling our first product (Merlin 6) by the Christmas season - I can post some details about it if there is interest.

That doesn't mean that I have forgotten about software

implemetantions

...

for PCs and such! They'll be coming along.

This new company will soon have its own web site, and there will also be a special web server written in Self called "Self Projects". The pages for this site will be editable and there will be space for all Self related projects.

-- Jecel

David Ungar David.Ungar@Eng.Sun.COM wrote:

Yes, HotSpot was an intellectual descendant of the Self VM work, and some of its key personnel were former Selfies.

Jason, do you have access to a fairly recent Macintosh?

• Dave

Is an iMac(w/64M) good enough?

Steve

David Ungar David.Ungar@Eng.Sun.COM wrote:

Jason, do you have access to a fairly recent Macintosh?

Sorry for being nosy: Is there a Self for it? Or HotSpot?

Jochen

Gráe, Jochen --- Jochen Schneider (josch@isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de) Otto-von-Guericke-Universit„t Institut fr Simulation und Graphik Postfach 4120 39016 Magdeburg

David Ungar David.Ungar@Eng.Sun.COM wrote:

This should depend on if anyone would use or improve it, and this is hard to get a sense of--so let me know if you want.

• Dave

PS: Right now, only the stupid compiler is there. The UI (ui2) is barely usable on my 266Mhz G3 and the transporter is a bit slow.

I'd love to play with it when the UI is running. I'd even find it usefull for writing server applications if it was running under Mac OS X. I'd also be willing to help with a port though my expertise is limited to the OS X Foundation and UI APIs.

Steve

I can borrow a PowerBook 3400 if that's recent enough... although if I'm really nice, I can beg a G3 book...

So is there a good incentive for me to borrow one :-)

Jason

David Ungar wrote:

Yes, HotSpot was an intellectual descendant of the Self VM work, and some of its key personnel were former Selfies.

Jason, do you have access to a fairly recent Macintosh?

• Dave

At 10:08 AM -0700 8/2/99, riftweaver@hotmail.com wrote:

...

Yes, I think its cool too; I've not been able to do more than read about Self, but having raided the old Sun site a few months ago, it seems like a very clean and fun language. Also persused the old Merlin stuff, and I am anxious to see what kind of system(s) you may produce.

Dave -- didn't you end up working on Sun's "HotSpot" Java compiler?

Jason Karney (jason@netgenics.com)

...

Cool!

• Dave

...

Hi, friends!

I've been without internet access for the past couple of weeks and am only now catching up with my email, including the discussions on this list.

I thought you might be interested to know that I am typing this from the offices of "Merlin Computer Technology", the first company dedicated to producing hardware implementations of Self. We hope to be selling our first product (Merlin 6) by the Christmas season - I can post some details about it if there is interest.

That doesn't mean that I have forgotten about software

implemetantions

...

...

for PCs and such! They'll be coming along.

This new company will soon have its own web site, and there will also be a special web server written in Self called "Self Projects". The pages for this site will be editable and there will be space for all Self related projects.

-- Jecel

---

eGroups.com home: http://www.egroups.com/group/self-interest http://www.egroups.com - Simplifying group communications

 David Ungar
 Sun Microsystems Laboratories
 (650) 336-2618

---

GET WHAT YOU DESERVE! A NextCard Platinum VISA: DOUBLE Rewards points, NO annual fee & rates as low as 9.9% FIXED APR. Apply online today! http://clickhere.egroups.com/click/606

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Gilad Bracha wrote:

At 03:46 PM 7/23/99 , Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:

...

[merlin 6]

Please do post any details you can (without, of course, disclosing anything proprietary).

Don't worry about that - all information about it will be available on the web under two licenses (see the end of the page on http://www.lsi.usp.br/~jecel/merlin4.7 for an idea of what they will be like).

Merlin 6 will be a small computer/keyboard combination (like the Commodore 64) and will include a pointing device like the "hula pointer" used in some notebooks.

Along the back will be the digital ports:

- USB - Firewire (three connectors) - Fast Ethernet - VGA out (not really digital, but...)

and on the side we have the analog ports:

- video out (NTSC and PAL) - video in (NTSC and PAL) - sound out (mono) - sound in (mono) - telephone (V.34 modem initially)

There is also a power cord and space for an optional battery. It is powered by a Xilinx Virtex XCV 300-6 field programmable gate array and also a Xilinx Spartan FPGA. It includes 32MB of 100 Mhz SDRAM, 640 KB of 10 ns SRAM (for the caches) and a 2 MB Flash memory. The rest of the circuit is composed of small interface chips. A DIMM socket allows expansion of the SDRAM.

The cache memory is linked to the FPGA over an 80 bit wide bus (including both tag and data information). It is divided into four regions: the data cache, the microcode cache, the PICs and the translator. The internal architecture of the CPU is a four issue MOVE (or TTA. See http://cardit.et.tudelft.nl/MOVE/) with four moves on each 64 bit instruction word. This is the "microcode" for the machine and is only stored in the microcode cache and the translator area. The externally visible machine code is simply Self bytecodes (but could be Java or Smalltalk bytecodes) and that is what is stored in main memory.

The microcode cache and the "loop coprocessors" (for multimedia. I hadn't mentioned them yet...) are rather complicated, so I'll post a link here as soon as I finish the web pages explaining them. I hope to cycle the CPU at 100 MHz even though I will be using the slowest speed grade (the other cost too much).

The Flash memory stores the bits for programming both FPGAs and also the system software. It includes two banks of programming, selectable with a strap. So you can use the machine to call up its own design, change it and save it to bank B in the Flash. Then you open up the machine (I feel that if you are not up to messing inside the machine, you shouldn't be redesigning it!) and change the strap to it tries to load from bank B after a reset. If that doesn't work, you move the strap back to A and boot normally into Self/R to change the design again to try to fix the problem. If you end up ruining both banks and can't boot the machine anymore, then set the strap to a third position and connect a cable to either another Merlin 6 or a PC with the right software and you can wipe the Flash clean and load a working design into it.

I think this is about as "open" as hardware will ever get and will be a great learning experience for the new generations that didn't get to build stuff from TTLs. What do you think?

-- Jecel P.S.: I got the site http://200.210.69.43 running over a 33kbps link, but the pages there are just placeholders until I can write something better.