The PIM/m-1 machine, one of the few "fifth generation computers" ever produced

The Fifth Generation Computer Systems project (FGCS) was an initiative by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, begun in 1982, to create a "fifth generation computer" (see history of computing hardware) which was supposed to perform much calculation utilizing massive parallelism. Image of a fifth generation computer systems project computer named PIM/m-1. ... Image of a fifth generation computer systems project computer named PIM/m-1. ... The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (通商産業省 Tsūsho-sangyō-shō or MITI) was the single most powerful agency in the Japanese government during the 1950s and 1960s. ... 1982 (MCMLXXXII) is a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Computing hardware has been an essential component of the process of calculation and data storage since it became useful for numerical values to be processed and shared. ... Massive parallelism is a term used in computer architecture and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design. ...

To succeed in this ambitious project, the driving organization Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) spent billions of yen in creating a specialized hardware and an operating system entirely written in a variant of Prolog programming language, as this was believed to be a truly parallelizable language. Five running "parallel inference machines" were eventually produced: Japanese 10 yen coin (obverse) showing Phoenix Hall of Byodoin Yen is the currency used in Japan. ... Hardware is the general term that is used to describe physical artifacts of a technology. ... In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. ... Prolog is a logic programming language. ...

• PIM/m
• PIM/p
• PIM/i
• PIM/k
• PIM/c

The project also produced applications to run on these systems, such as the parallel database management system Kappa, the legal reasoning system HELIC-II, and the automated theorem prover MGTP. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Automated theorem proving (currently the most important subfield of automated reasoning) is the proving of mathematical theorems by a computer program. ...

The FGCS Project did not meet with commercial success for reasons similar to the Lisp machine companies and Thinking Machines. The software was not suitable for commercial applications and the proprietary architecture was eventually surpassed in speed by less specialized hardware (for example, Sun workstations and Intel x86 machines). The project did produce a new generation of promising Japanese researchers. But after the FGCS Project, MITI stopped funding large-scale computer research projects, and the research momentum developed by the FGCS Project dissipated. The computers, operating system and programs produced by the project are now of historical, academic interest. Lisp machines were general purpose computers designed (usually with hardware support) to efficiently run Lisp as their main language. ... Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1982 by W. Daniel Hillis and Sheryl Handler to turn Hilliss doctoral work at MIT on parallel computing architectures into a commercial product called the Connection Machine. ... Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) (HKSE: 4335) (founded 1968) is a U.S.-based multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... x86 or 80x86 is the generic name of a microprocessor architecture first developed and manufactured by Intel. ... The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (通商産業省 Tsūsho-sangyō-shō or MITI) was the single most powerful agency in the Japanese government during the 1950s and 1960s. ...

Timeline

• 1982: the FGCS project begins and receives funding for 5 years.
• 1985: the first FGCS hardware known as the Personal Sequential Inference Machine (PSI) and the first version of the Sequentual Inference Machine P? Operating System (SIMPOS) operating system is released. SIMPOS is programmed in Kernel Language 0 (KL0), a concurrent prolog-variant with object oriented extensions.
• 1987: a prototype of a truly parallel hardware called the Parallel Inference Machine (PIM) is built using several PSI:s connected in a network. The project receives funding for 5 more years. A new version of the kernel language Kernel Language 1 (KL1) which look very similar to "Flat GDC" (Flat Guarded Definite Clauses) is created, influenced by developments in prolog. The operating system written in KL1 is renamed Parallel Inference Machine Operating System or PIMOS.
• 1991: the first Parallel Inference Machine that actually works is produced.
• 1992: the FGCS program is cancelled/ended. The source code for PIMOS is made public domain, but since it can only run on the PIM-machine, some additional funding is given to produce an emulator for UNIX named KL1 to C compiler (KLIC).

1982 (MCMLXXXII) is a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article is about the year. ... An object is fundamental concept in object-oriented programming. ... 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1991 (MCMXCI) is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Guide to UNIX Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...

Reference

• Ehud Shapiro. The family of concurrent logic programming languages ACM Computing Surveys. September 1989.
• Carl Hewitt and Gul Agha. Guarded Horn clause languages: are they deductive and Logical? International Conference on Fifth Generation Computer Systems, Ohmsha 1988. Tokyo.
• Shunichi Uchida and Kazuhiro Fuchi Proceedings of the FGCS Project Evaluation Workshop Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT). 1992.

Ehud Shapiro (born 1955) is a Jewish scientist in Israel who is developing a DNA computer. ...

External links

• ICOT home page (now AITEC)
• FGCS museum
• ICOT Free Software
• KL1 to C compiler homepage
• A brief history of parallel logic programming
• Conference proceedings on FGCS