What is the Coalescent Computer?
The Coalescent Computer is a brand new computing environment designed to empower people to reclaim computers as tools for individual and collective liberation, with a focus on data soveriegnty, minimization of data/compute/energy/carbon footprints, and "network coalescence". It is intended to be a permacomputer, designed to scale computing down from the global level to the community level, and to allow for mutation and evolution within communities of practice.
In its current form, the Coalescent Computer exists as a research project that intends to deliver a conceptual specification for a machine instruction set, data encoding protocol, data querying language, and communication protocols for a computing environment built on the principle of "coalescence", meaning that any instance of the machine can effortlessly integrate its state with any other instance. This website documents that research project.
As part of this research effort there will also be concrete reference implementations of each component of the stack, resulting in a real, usable computing environment that can handle real, interesting use cases for real, living people. The hope is that the principles of coalescence can provide an environment for rapid development of the ecosystem to the point where it can replace increasingly more parts of the World Wide Web. And since the system is "protocol-first", the original reference implementation can easily be ported to other platforms or replaced with more optimized implementations as adoption rollout requires.
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Project Status
Last Updated 10/21/23Active Development
The Coalescent Database is now under early active development. The first goal is to build a baseline database that can store and query simple CODA objects that can be accessed via a REST API for faster iteration.
The VM now executes programs and also supports extensible device development. As a proof of concept, the cohost CLI includes a 'Console' device that can send and receive data from the CPU.
ROM assembly and symbol export is now functional, and the current focus is on making the content addressable code library more intuitive to work with.