“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.”