What are the really unusual or weird computers?

On 6/22/07, John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> wrote: The full name was "Macintosh Programmer's Workshop" It let you use *nix style development tools such as yacc, patch and grep, and gave you a CLI to the compilers and linkers. Also, the colon *was* the internal path seperator for the Mac, just like / in *nix and \ in MS-DOS. Most of the "Classic" macs had a piece of plastic called the "Programmer's Switch." All it did was extend two micro switches hidden inside the bottom side vents of the original all-in-one Macs, the interrupt and reset buttons. Reset did a soft reset of the machine. Interrupt sent an interrupt telling the Mac to bring up a debugger window, either the limited built-in debugger, or the MacsBug extension if it was installed. There were some fun hacks you could do modifying memory mid-stream, in a game, for example :) The "General Purpose Computers" in the Space Shuttle have a somewhat strange architecture, if I recall correctly. I'm not sure I'd count them as computers, but the Soviet Union made some sophisticated, oddball calculators, there's an online museum dedicated to them somewhere. There were a handful of Smalltalk machines built in the early 80's, cousins in weirdness to the old LISP machines, I'm sure. Most supercomputers had/have unique architectures. Check out the Connection Machine and the nCube machines. There was a project by some computer scientist in England to build a genetic computer in silicon. There was a show on TechTV called Big Thinkers that covered it. It ended up in a fiasco for some reason or another and the company was dissolved, but a working machine was built. There's a java simulator of the software online somewhere.