Eo's and Hobbits (was Re: Language-specific CPUs was Re: uIEC/SD == AWESOME!)

Cameron Kaiser wrote: It's optimized in the sense that it's a stack based architecture. i.e. no registers. You work with it as if it has registers, but your registers are offsets into the stack based on the stack pointer. It's kinda CISC like, opcodes aren't all the same size, but it's also RISC like in other regards. I don't recall if it had an FPU, but it did have a separate chip for an MMU, another one for video, another one for PCMCIA I/O - was a whole family. Far as I know, was only used for the AT&T Eo and very early Be Boxes. Funny thing about it, it was built for Apple's Newton project, but they chose the ARM chip instead. But they went into Eo's instead. Go's Penpoint OS is used in the Eo's - IBM made a touch screen thinkpad that could run either PenWindows or Penpoint. It's interesting to note that while the 486 inside the Thinkpad (I think it's a 730T?) runs at the same clock rate, runs the same OS, but the Eo runs circles around it. :-) So certainly, the Hobbit could kick the crap out of a 486. Sad, it was a neat little CPU. Too bad nothing else used it. There were two Eo's, 440 and 880. The 880 even had SCSI support and a floppy drive port too. There was also a funky cellular module (analog of course) with a full size desk phone handset that it cradled. Both used SRAM PCMCIA cards and a PCMCIA like ROM slot - both had internal hard drive options, but the drives from the 880 don't match those in the 440 - they're all nonstandard. The 880, but not the 440 also has a backlight, but it's not software controlled, there's a hard switch that you can use to make it light up. They use a magnetic digitizer, so you need special pens. The pens from the 730 Thinkpad work with the Eo's and vice versa (I think). The Eo's spoke UUCP over their cellular modem and could thus receive/send email that way. The Newton of course had much better handwriting recognition, so the Eo died (to be in turn killed by Palm), but despite that, Penpoint was an interesting OS that had the look and feel of a paper organizer (tabs, pages, etc. as opposed to desktop GUIs which appropriately use a "desktop" metaphor.) If you recall the "AT&T You will commercials" back in the early 90's - the ones with "Have you ever sent a fax from the beach?" - they showed an Eo without one of the ears. The ears contain a microphone on one side and a speaker on the other.