By the time the project had delivered its first implementation, new processors like the Sun SPARC and Intel 486 had surpassed its performance, and development was abandoned in 1988.
The Rekursiv project started as an effort to improve the assembly line controls in Linn's factories in Glasgow, Scotland.
Their lines were automated using a suite of VAX-11 systems, but these were slow and very difficult to program with the flexibility that Linn's founder, Ivor Tiefenbrun, desired.
[1] In 1981, Tiefenbrun hired a number of programmers to write a version of the Smalltalk language for the VAX systems, borrowing some syntax from ALGOL.
Tiefenbrun concluded the solution to the performance issue was not to improve the language on the VAX but instead produce an entirely new CPU dedicated specifically to running object programs.
[1] In 1984, Tiefenbrun formed the wholly owned subsidiary Linn Smart Computing under the direction of University of Strathclyde professor David Harland and the Rekursiv project was born.
[a] The underlying concept of the Rekursiv platform was to provide a hardware-assisted persistent object store, constantly and invisibly writing the memory state to disk without intervention from the operating system or the user's program.
[5] To make such a system work with reasonable performance while running complex programs, Rekursiv was designed to allow the programmer to write their own instruction set architecture (ISA) dedicated to the language they were using.
To handle garbage collection, Objekt divided the provided dynamic RAM (main memory) into two halves, using one for new object creation and leaving the other unused.
In extremely memory-limited cases, Objekt would first attempt to spool some objects to disk, and if that failed to free up enough room, would use both halves of memory.
This allowed such simple values to be immediately presented to the processor without the need to follow a pointer to the physical location, which saved memory and improved performance.
Initially, the only product was "HADES", the "Hardware Accelerator for Dynamic Expert Systems", which consisted of a VMEbus card that could be plugged into a Sun-3 or Sun-4 workstation.