It's just interesting that in theory a CPU could be designed that didn't have the concept of memory as a sequential array of bytes.
In fact, in the future this will probably rear its head again. Managing storage at a higher level could make things like massively parallel computing, caching schemes and virtual memory more powerful.
Perhaps one day the elaborate hoops current CPUs and OSs have to jump through to maintain performance in the face of memory latency limitations will be surpassed by something like this, and just as C is best suited as a systems programming language for a flat memory model, so a language like lisp will be best suited to low-level programming for this new architecture.
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I don't think it was ever built.
It's just interesting that in theory a CPU could be designed that didn't have the concept of memory as a sequential array of bytes.
In fact, in the future this will probably rear its head again. Managing storage at a higher level could make things like massively parallel computing, caching schemes and virtual memory more powerful.
Perhaps one day the elaborate hoops current CPUs and OSs have to jump through to maintain performance in the face of memory latency limitations will be surpassed by something like this, and just as C is best suited as a systems programming language for a flat memory model, so a language like lisp will be best suited to low-level programming for this new architecture.