<story><title>Amiga Java</title><url>http://www.mikekohn.net/micro/amiga_java.php</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pavlov</author><text>Seeing &amp;quot;Amiga&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Java&amp;quot; together reminds me of Amiga Anywhere, a brilliant and completely misunderstood gaming&amp;#x2F;entertainment VM project twenty years ago:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arstechnica.com&amp;#x2F;gadgets&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;a-history-of-the-amiga-part-12-red-vs-blue&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arstechnica.com&amp;#x2F;gadgets&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;a-history-of-the-ami...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It didn&amp;#x27;t really have anything to do with the original Amiga. It was a rebranding of a strange high-performance VM designed by some very clever people in UK:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Tao had created a product that was so innovative that few people understood what it actually was. Taos was an operating system that was coded in VP1, an advanced assembly language that used instructions for an imaginary, idealized RISC CPU. When Taos programs were loaded into memory, the system translated the VP1 opcodes into the equivalent ones for whatever CPU it happened to be running on. Taos could run on an x86, a MIPS, a PowerPC, or a transputer, and many more—or even different combinations running at the same time. Because VP1 instructions were more compact than most CPU’s native opcodes, Taos programs would often load and run faster than native ones, even when you included the time it took to do the translation. Taos was a little bit like magic.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of course HN past has the details on this interesting bit of alternative software history:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=9808159&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=9808159&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Amiga Java</title><url>http://www.mikekohn.net/micro/amiga_java.php</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>unwind</author><text>It is so weird to see the cool computers of my teens put on a blanketed table. Makes them look like amcient artifacts, to be approached by wizards only. Kind of like how I felt seeing rackfuls of mainfrane hardware, back then. :)</text></comment>