:The Register: Torvalds confirms Transmeta 19 January 2000 'D-Day'
The Register: Torvalds confirms Transmeta 19 January 2000 'D-Day' Nov 16, 1999, 15 :51 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (3587 reads) (Other stories by Tony Smith)
"Transmeta will spill the beans on 19 January 2000, the company's most famous
employee, Linus 'Linux' Torvalds, revealed today. That's the day on which the secretive
chip company will come clean on what it's been up to."
"Torvalds revealed the date during his Comdex keynote -- a talk that centred on how
the IT industry has finally "got the point" about open source software, and touched on
Transmeta just once. His statement confirms a report last week which claimed that 19
January would be D-Day for Transmeta...."
"Torvalds didn't offer much more than the date. He did say that Transmeta's product
was a "smart" CPU, and claimed it was the first chip designed in software. Quite was he
meant by this isn't entirely clear -- all modern chips are designed to a greater degree
using software simulation tools. However, it could be that Torvalds was indicating the
chip's functionality is programmable, a concept that emerged a couple of years back in
a paper published in Scientific American."
