July 18, 2026
Canal sunk, comments floated
The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
A genius 1988 machine sank, and the comments turned it into a legend
TLDR: A Scottish company built a startlingly advanced computer in the 1980s, but it failed because the world wasn’t ready for it. Commenters turned that into a soap opera about bad timing, government blame, personal regret, and jokes about secret canal computers.
This story has everything: a Scottish hi-fi company, a wildly ambitious computer from the 1980s, and a tragic ending involving a canal. The big reveal from the article is that Linn’s forgotten Rekursiv machine was built decades too early. It tried to make computers safer and smarter by stopping bad memory mistakes, cleaning up its own mess, and treating stored data like it never really went away. Back then, that sounded like madness. Now, readers are gawking that the same basic ideas are finally showing up in modern chips from companies like Arm. In other words: the weird canal computer may have been right all along.
But the real drama is in the crowd reaction. One camp is mourning a lost future, with commenters basically yelling that brilliance alone doesn’t win and that luck, timing, and politics can crush even great ideas. One especially reflective reply turned into a mini life crisis about using “luck” as an excuse not to try, while another went full blame mode and accused the British government of helping kill off companies like this. Then the old-school computer history crowd stepped in to cool things down, arguing this wasn’t magic so much as a brilliant idea that got beaten by the limits of chips, pins, and cost at the time.
And because the internet refuses to stay solemn for long, there was also peak comment-section chaos: one person immediately imagined hiding a tiny computer at the bottom of a canal powered by flowing water, for reasons even they couldn’t explain. Another got distracted by the site’s orange-and-teal color palette. As seen on Hacker News, this wasn’t just a history lesson — it was a live performance of nostalgia, regret, blame, and nerd humor.
Key Points
- •The article says Linn Products built the Rekursiv in the 1980s as a custom object-oriented computer system with hardware-enforced type and bounds checking, garbage collection, and persistent object storage.
- •Ivor Tiefenbrun’s dissatisfaction with factory software led Linn to pursue a system that tracked each physical factory item with a corresponding software object.
- •Linn first developed an object-oriented language called LINGO, but its performance on VAX systems was insufficient for the company’s automation goals.
- •David Harland and Bruno Beloff helped redesign the concept into custom silicon, and Linn Smart Computing was formed in 1984 to develop it.
- •LSI Logic fabricated four custom CMOS gate arrays for Rekursiv, including the OBJEKT chip, which mapped 40-bit object identifiers to physical memory locations while enforcing hardware safety checks.