This thread has been a real disappointment. Almost all of the responses
have been about computers using standard microprocessors - off the shelf
components. Yes a few had non-vanilla flavored OS's, or idiotic I/O
schemes. A few were even painted different colors from PC Beige.
But nobody got into the really weird internals that have made the industry
so fascinating. Go back to the real early days, like the Atlas, that let
you build your instruction set from scratch using micro-code. Nobody seemed
to remember that most of the late 50's and early 60's used 40 bits as a
standard. What about the MicroData machines with a build your own
instructions on the fly?
And then there were the ultra-strange like the G-15 - 29 bit word size, all
instructions were modified moves through arithmetic logic or I/O devices.
The I/O devices were actually part of the internal logic - no channels.
Burroughs had some fascinating ideas on virtual memory in the 5500 series.
Seymour Cray lived weird and unusual in most of his designs. Several people
have developed machines to run high level languages in native mode: ADA at
Rational, APL on the Star 100, LISP, COBOL, etc.
There's not much unusual about putting some glue logic around a $3 micro
chip. We've all done it. How about the truly weird machines? Doesn't
anyone remember when logic didn't come in million transistor packages?
Come on people: there were computers long before there were microcomputers.
And many of them were wonderfully different and creative.
Billy