Transputer
This section is all about the wonderful and ingenious Transputers from the now defunct UK company Inmos Ltd..
I'm not going into all the nitty-gritty details of this CPU - there are other pages which have done that very, very good:
- Transputer.net - Mike Brüstle is the most active Transputer tinkerer right now. Features cool hardware projects, self written drivers and a constantly growing number of carefully prepared PDF conversions of the original Inmos documents.
- Gavin Crates wonderful Transputer Emulator is the rescue for all of you not having the real-thing at hand yet.
- Ram Meenakshisundaram's page. The basecamp of all Transputer expeditions. The biggest repository of links, hardware description & software - sadly it seems Ram stopped working on it...
- Wikipedia -The facts in a short form.
I think my first contact with transputers were the annoucement of the Atari Transputer Workstation (aka ATW or ABAQ). I was able to catch a glimpse in a "behind the scene" room on Ataris booth at CeBit '89. It was looking like a PC, having an Atari-ST slabbed to another mainboard and featured the Motiv GUI on a huge screen ... and the estimated price was way beyond my budget.
But now those wonderful chips are available at reasonable prices (compared to 1992 when a T800 was ~800DM)... which start to go up again as people seem to rediscover them.
For an cheap & easy entry into the world of transputers see my AVM B1 article.
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