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Re: Transputer

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Stephen Hall <s__hall@gmail.com> wrote:
> Steve555 <Steve555@bogus.nodomain.nowhere.invalid> wrote:
>> On 2019-04-27, Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
>>> 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
>> 
>> My uni had some transputer projects, both in the comp sci department
>> and the electronics dept.  It had its own language called Occam.
> 
> It actually makes sense. I suspect there is no way for revolution in
> computing without new processors and new language for them.
> 
> For many, many years Intel and competitors were making processors that just
> emulate PDP-11 architecture. I'm not the only one who thinks this is the
> issue:
> 
> <https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479>
> 
>> The root cause of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities was that
>> processor architects were trying to build not just fast processors, but
>> fast processors that expose the same abstract machine as a PDP-11. This
>> is essential because it allows C programmers to continue in the belief
>> that their language is close to the underlying hardware.
> 
> If people want more from their hardware they should be willing to write
> their software accordingly.
> 
Except that S390 & succesors, whose ISA is nothing like a pdp-11 is
also subject to Spectre.

Linux written mainly in C runs on everything for X86 to S390 and
RISC-V. Lots of different ISA's, yet C is low-level enough.

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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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