Speaking of this, I remember at the 1980 usenix the discussion of how UCB folks had done a one wire change to allow MFPU (move from previous user space) to function in user mode, thus allowing a kind of weird not quite shared memory IPC. 

Good times, when you could rip open the machine and make it better ...

ron

On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 11:44 AM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
    > From: "Steve Johnson"

    > The meetings went on for over a year, but _I NEVER MET WITH THE SAME
    > PERSON TWICE!_ It seemed that the only thing the marketing group knew
    > how to do was reorganize the marketing group...

Shades of SI:Electric-Marketing (I _think_ that was its name) on the Symbolics
LISP Machine...

(For those who never had the joy of seeing this, it randomly drew a bunch of
boxes with people in them on the screen in a hierarchy, connected them, and
then started randomly moving the boxes around... I wonder if the source
still exists - or, better yet, a video of it running? Probably not, alas.)

       Noel