The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal

https://negroniventurestudios.com/2026/07/18/the-computer-at-the-bottom-of-a-canal/

by Kudos • 5 days ago

183 48 5 days ago

inigyou• 5 days ago

I wonder if you could throw a small microcontroller at the bottom of a canal, powered by water passing through a fan, to hide it. And why you would want to do that.

ErroneousBosh• 5 days ago

Water quality monitoring. Communicate back to the surface with ultrasonic pulses.

arnsholt2• 4 days ago

And in case people think ultrasonic signaling isn’t a real thing, it very much is. In the oil and gas industry, it’s how measurements taken while drilling a hole are sent back to the surface through the drilling mud.

lexicality2• 4 days ago

canals have negligible water flow (except during disasters!) so I don't think that'd work very well. They also get dredged occasionally so there's a decent chance anything you leave down there won't last more than a couple of years

fragmede3• 4 days ago

They do have tides though, so make it a big fan that points up.

DonHopkins• 4 days ago

They also get dredged occasionally

And it's fascinating to watch!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGFC6MF5-_k

scottconover• 4 days ago

Website design comment: I love the orange/teal theme! Really drawn to the details such as illustrations carrying the orange/teal theme. Inspired me to re-color a project with this split complimentary color.

g-b-r2• 4 days ago

I personally hate the colors; I don't know if it was vibe coded, but it resembles the browns that GPT loves a lot.

I'm looking at it from a crappy screen, though.

g-b-r2• 4 days ago

Ok, I forgot about it, that was with dark mode enabled. Without it it's much better.

Hnrobert42• 4 days ago

I console myself that this is why I never got fabulously wealthy. That brilliance is no guarantee of wealth. You need luck, too.

But the truth is, you also need to do the work. I used my conclusion about luck as an excuse to not even try. Not even in some grand way. Just in the grinding everyday way. In the way of, "You know what I should do?! I should ... meh. That'll never work."

Take it from me, kids. If you want to do something great, do it while you are still young enough to believe it's possible.

throw83939r0r• 4 days ago

Too bad british goverments had to kill companies like that. But the new business plan is going much better!

psd1• 3 days ago

Your embarrassment could have been avoided by reading TFA.

Taniwha3• 4 days ago

Thing is capability machines (like this and the 432 and lots of research machines) were very much the thing at the time - cutting edge even. The research literature was full of them. I did a paper design at the time.

What ate them up was "what can you fit all on a chip with not many pins", followed by "what can you fit along with a cache on a chip with more pins", things move so much faster if everything's on the same die.

Tagged architectures are old, Burroughs mainframes had them back in the 70s along with rudimentary hardware objects (pageable even)

ishanmahapatra2• 4 days ago

Can you expand on your paper computer? It sounds fascinating.

Taniwha3• 4 days ago

It was more than 40 years ago, before I had the skills to build chips, I'm afraid I've kept nothing of that design

tclancy2• 4 days ago

The end of the article seems to admit all of what you say but then suggest it is time to revisit; do you think that’s valid or no?

Taniwha3• 4 days ago

I'm in 2 minds, I'm strongly in the RISC camp these days, I know how hard it is to build a truly performant CPU and think that simpler is better as far as ISAs go. Adding segmentation hardware into the addressing path means more clocks and makes it's harder to detect loads/stores that interfere with each other (all load/stores have to block each other until the addressing/tlb lookup has been done ie detecting aliasing ).

A true capability architecture needs separate register files for pointers and data with protections enforced when the address registers are loaded/stored, it's a step away from our models of linear address spaces that many of the languages we use today are based on. And any new CPU that requires everyone to learn a new language is probably a non-starter as a mainstream CPU

pjmlp• 4 days ago

They are old and still around, even though communities like HN tend to ignore them.

IBM i, z/OS, ClearPath MCP, and ClearPath OS 2200 are still out there, getting new releases, every now and then.

SPARC ADI is still being sold by Oracle and Fujitsu.

ARM MTE and Pluton are shipping, even if in not all models.

tibbydudeza• 4 days ago

I read about them in Byte Magazine - the names were memorable - Objek - Numerik and a third chip - there were no silicon afaik but jsut emulator circuit boards run by a Sun workstation.

EdwardCoffin• 4 days ago

Objekt, Numerik, Logik, Klock, according to Wikipedia [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rekursiv#Physical_packaging

fuzzfactor• 4 days ago

In my essay a distribution of one I argued that bespoke software was the original, correct arrangement, that fifty years of productised general-purpose software were a compromise forced by the economics of scarce programmers, and that AI has ended the compromise.

I would also say that productised general-purpose software was an undue bonanza taking unfair advantage of copyright, which shouldn't have allowed so many restrictions on code which is necessary to make devices perform their intended tasks.

Fortunately AI has been able to get started accomplishing some of the much-needed workarounds to these annoying copyright issues, like few humans have been able to do.

Regardless of whether programmers are scarce or abundant.

On a tangent, it sounds like a famous canal, but I would figure there are a number of little-known waterways where there might be a high-performance 21st century PC resting underwater along with some poor soul's bitcoin wallet :(

leoc• 4 days ago

The "A Distribution of One" argument seems less convincing than the "The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal" one. I'm no expert, but if you've ever read some of the computing press from the time you'll know that custom software was still rather popular well into the '80s: and unfortunately custom software written for in-house use by a non-software company was the classic venue for all the Software Crisis war stories, which probably has a lot more to do with why it went out of fashion than progammer wages on their own. Whether the main problem was the difficulty of extracting requirements from users and management or the lack of sufficiently good software developers, maybe the arrival of LLM software cannons will be what it takes to fix it, but a hae ma doots.

dpedu• 4 days ago

What remains of this computer? Diagrams? Code? Anything that would let us take a closer look at how it works?

JSR_FDED• 4 days ago

It’s crazy what a small group of smart people can achieve if they’re not captive to conventional wisdom.

They got crushed by the commodity curve and Moore’s Law. But still a great story - and thankfully written by a real person.

The author’s idea that the commodity curve is over and that hardware is now cheap enough to make special purpose hardware viable is intriguing. Standardization used to be important because you needed to convince scarce programmers to invest in the platform, but AI has ended the scarcity of programmers so dedicated purpose hardware is more viable than ever.

imglorp• 4 days ago

There are several cycles that bring tech ideas in and out of fashion because of market conditions, intersecting tech cycles, other implications of Moore's Law, or whatever.

Another trend, for example, might be centralized vs distributed: terminals (thin clients) and mainframes gave way to fat client PCs on prem, and then back to thin clients with cloud stuff.

ozhero• 4 days ago

A fascinating story.

I owned a Linn Sondek turntabe in the 70's with a Denon cartridge.

Spent a crazy amount on Hi-Fi chasing the audiophile dream :-)

needSomeCoffee• 4 days ago

Very interesting and well written article. This sentence in particular:

"Linn Products is the Glasgow company Ivor Tiefenbrun founded in 1972, and if you know it at all you know it for the Sondek LP12, still widely regarded by its partisans as the finest record deck ever made."

I was a big audiophile right at that time. Auditioned both Sondek and Sota Star Saphire. Went with the latter which I still proudly own (Alphason Tonearm). Note how carefully the author phrased "...by its partisans..." when describing the Sondek as the best. Nothing, not even programing code style zealots today can compare to audiophiles and their "take" on what made for the best playback. Pretty sure the author did not want to open that can of worms by simply declaring the Sondek the best.

Turntables back then were pretty damn detailed re: technology. Not surprised Linn could make a great computer (in the day).

HTH, NSC

stavros• 4 days ago

Yeah but also saying "it's considered the best by the people who love it" is a tautology.

n49o7• 4 days ago

Therein lies the humor, imo.

fwipsy3• 4 days ago

I don't think this is AI, but the writing style keeps reminding me of AI. I'm trying to isolate why. I think it's something to do with the information density. The sentences twist and turn, have lots of related ideas, digressions, and little details without much lead-in. The wording is also very precise, which is another characteristic of AI writing. This sounds like a critique, but I actually find it charming.

This sentence is a strong illustration of what I'm talking about:

Since only OBJEKT ever knew where anything physically lived, objects could be relocated freely without touching a reference, so garbage collection went into the silicon too: a two-space compacting collector that walked the live objects and slid them into the other half of DRAM while execution carried on above, oblivious.

I mean, come on. Run-ons are one thing, but this is practically a lecture in a single sentence. :P

Luc3• 4 days ago

Very well-written text, not a whiff of AI generation to it.

Your example is not even a run-on sentence!

I enjoyed reading it, many thanks to the author.

fwipsy3• 4 days ago

Yeah I'm not sure, just identifying that subjectively, this is the impression I get. Maybe I just associate any style which is especially fluent and avoids vernacular with AI at this point.

tclancy2• 4 days ago

I really enjoyed it, but I think there’s more than a whiff.

That curve is gone. The compromise is going with it; and the workload-shaped machine, the thing Harland was building in 1984, is what comes back.

tmzt• 2 days ago

The 40-bit hashed address seemed familiar, then I realized that I (and Claude) had used a similar concept in a VM we built for the OS I've been building. It's a capability and typing system that enables import boundaries to be enforced and third-party packages are unable to perform security sensative operations without being specially signed. It's also a "distribution of one" concept as the user builds their own UI to their specification personalising the OS.

The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal

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