In 1988, Scottish hi-fi firm Linn Products sank a custom processor called the Rekursiv into the Forth and Clyde Canal. Founder Ivor Tiefenbrun, frustrated by slow VAX performance running their object-oriented language LINGO, funded Linn Smart Computing with £10 million from the Department of Trade and Industry. Designed by David Harland and Bruno Beloff, the Rekursiv used four gate arrays — NUMERIK, LOGIK, OBJEKT, and KLOK — to enforce type and bounds checking in hardware, perform garbage collection in silicon, and treat memory and disk as a single persistent object store. Microcoded instructions could even recurse, hence the name.

The architecture was technically radical but commercially doomed. By the time boards shipped, RISC workstations and commodity microprocessors — improving at 52% annually during the "attack of the killer micros" — had obliterated its performance claims. A Sun-3 running threaded LINGO outperformed the Rekursiv by 2x. Only twenty to thirty boards were built, mostly for universities; none ran Linn's production line.

The project ended after Black Monday strained finances and a delivery driver reversed into Harland's Porsche. Tiefenbrun refused to pay for repairs on private ground, prompting Harland's resignation. He threw his hardware and backups into the canal. Nearly forty years later, Arm now ships similar capabilities — hardware bounds checking, tagged memory, and persistent object models — in production silicon, validating the Rekursiv's vision, if not its timing.