

David May, parallel processing pioneer - signa11
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/08/18/heroes_of_tech_david_may/print.html

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ColinWright
You may be interested in the discussion from the last time this was submitted:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898569>

Related discussions can be found with this search:

[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=transputer](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=transputer)

In particular, in <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898667> I wrote:

    
    
        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.

