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Transputer

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Retrotechtacular: Transputer
by: Jenny List, April 19, 2019
- https://hackaday.com/2019/04/19/retrotechtacular-transputer/

"Back in 2016, Hackaday published a review of The National Museum
 of Computing, at Bletchley Park. It mentions among the fascinating
 array of computer artifacts on display a single box that could be
 found in the corner of a room alongside their Cray-1 supercomputer.
 This was a Transputer development system, and though its
 architecture is almost forgotten today there was a time when this
 British-developed microprocessor family had a real prospect of
 representing the future of computing. So what on earth was the
 Transputer, why was it special, and why don't we have one on every
 desk in 2019?

 Inmos, based in Bristol, were a - no, make that the - British
 semiconductor company, in the days when governments saw such things
 as a home-grown semiconductor manufacturing capability to be of
 strategic importance. They made microcomputer peripheral chips, RAM
 chips, and video chips (the workaday silicon of 1980s computing) but
 their exciting project was the Transputer.

 This microprocessor family addressed the speed bottlenecks inherent
 to conventional processors of the day by being built from the ground
 up to be massively multiprocessor. A network of Transputer
 processors would share a web of serial interconnects arranged in a
 crosspoint formation, allowing multiple of them to connect with each
 other independently and without collisions. It was the first to
 feature such an architecture, and at the time was seen as the Next
 Big Thing. All computers were going to use Transputers by the end of
 the 1990s, so electronic engineering students were taught all about
 them and encountered them in their group projects. I remember my
 year of third-year EE class would split into groups, each of tasked
 with a part of a greater project that would communicate through the
 crosspoint switch at the heart of one of the Transputer systems,
 though my recollection is that none of the groups went so far as to
 get anything to work. Still how this machine was designed is fun to
 look back on in modern times. Let's dig in!" ...

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Transputer Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> - 2019-04-27 06:09 +0000
  Re: Transputer Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2019-04-27 09:08 +0100
    Re: Transputer Bob Eager <news0073@eager.cx> - 2019-04-27 11:28 +0000
  Re: Transputer Steve555 <Steve555@bogus.nodomain.nowhere.invalid> - 2019-06-15 20:05 +0000
    Re: Transputer Bob Eager <news0073@eager.cx> - 2019-06-15 23:07 +0000
      Re: Transputer Steve555 <Steve555@reallybogus.nodomain.nowhere.invalid> - 2019-06-16 22:54 +0000
    Re: Transputer Stephen Hall <s__hall@gmail.com> - 2019-06-17 03:50 +0000
      Re: Transputer Jerry Peters <jerry@example.invalid> - 2019-06-17 20:23 +0000
        Re: Transputer kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) - 2019-06-18 09:43 -0400

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