
Transputation: a brief history of Inmos - mikhailfranco
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/08/18/heroes_of_tech_david_may/
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ColinWright
I used to program a 96-processor machine. It could do what were for the time
some quite amazing things in quite a small package. The interconnections were
dynamically reconfigurable, so you could make the mesh of processors match the
mesh of your problem (within limits) and avoid bottlenecks getting data from
one place to another.

Very cool, very advanced, and no one seemed to "get it."

But it was impossible to get programmers to understand how to write programs
for it, and it was impossible to get problem domain experts to write decent
programs at all. Every problem people brought to me to get parallelised was
trivially re-written to run tens, sometimes hundreds of times faster. It was a
solution looking for a problem that never showed up.

I learned a lot from that project, some of which is still in action today,
about programming large, multi-processor systems. But I still remember Occam
(and its friends (yes, it had friends)) with some fondness.

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ctdonath
A fascinating system. As a college student I thought it was the coolest
concept (and it's still awesome 30ish years later). The immediate obvious
problem, and what took it down, was the amount of hardware required and the
paradigm shift to use them - not a huge obstacle, but enough to hinder
proliferation.

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vytis
I've attended Computer Architecture lectures with David May - incredible
character with profound knowledge of anything related to computer hardware.
His new company (<http://xmos.com>) is also worth looking at if you're
interested in parallel computing.

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pelle
While we never got it to production, we had a project based on the transputer
in my first startup back in 1987 (a couple of naive high school kids in
Denmark bootstrapping a high end workstation company).

Our plan was to use it to create a infinitely expandable workstation for both
3d and audio work. The design of the transputer was incredibly elegant, it was
pretty much as easy to design with as a 6500 one chip computer and didn't
require any extra support chips.

The Occam language was also pretty elegant for its time. It was essentially
parallel Pascal. I don't remember it having any OO features, but the
automatically parallelized looping constructs were unique for their time.

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protomyth
I do miss Occam. It was a good way of thinking to layout your program in steps
with data moving through the system. Other, newer languages do the same thing
but feel like they don't trust the parallelism in some ways ("here's how you
write programs, oh yeah, this is how we do parallel").

I often think Occam and Forth / Postscript are the languages that made me
think the most about what a program should be.

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yvdriess
Is there any relation between Inmos and Tilera? They basically revived the
full transputer.

