Here is the one technical bit, the rest is a very entertaining job story.
> The thing about the REKURSIV was that users could program different instruction sets. James Lothian, who was worked at Edinburgh University microcoding the Prolog instruction set describes it as being "a really interesting and unusual design: the main memory was in effect a persistent object store, with every object having its type, size and position in memory known in hardware, so that (for example) the hardware could prevent you from 'running off the end of an array and corrupting surrounding memory. Paging of objects into and out of main memory was handled by the host machine (generally a Sun 3), and was completely transparent, even at the microcode level. This meant that you could write arbitrarily complex algorithms in microcode, even recursive ones, hence the machine's name. Every object had a unique identifier (a 40-bit number), and the MMU chip would translate that into the object's store address (if it was in main memory). Since only the MMU knew the object's address, an object could be moved around in memory without having to update references to it (since they were in terms of its object number); this made garbage-collection particularly straightforward."
