
Atari Transputer Workstation - bane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation
======
kabdib
One fine morning I opened the San Jose Mercury News to see that Atari had
announced a new Transputer-based workstation.

It was especially exciting because I was working for Atari Corp, and our
little engineering team (of maybe 20 hardware and software people) had no
inkling we'd been working on it!

This was a project shot out without permission by a group in the UK. They
hadn't bothered to tell us.

[I rather liked the Transputer architecture. Bizarre, but very interesting]

~~~
dboreham
Funny because I worked at Inmos at the time and we like "ATW, WTF??"

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mdda
Wow - this brings back memories... When I was an undergrad, I took a summer
job at Perihelion writing demos for the ATW.

From what I recall, things weren't going great, and most of the staff was
grumbling about the Atari side of the machine. Since Atari was where the
latest funding had come from, there was a strong desire by management to show
how the Atari hardware (display, disk interface, etc) was essential to the
whole set-up. Whereas from an engineering point of view the Atari front-end
was pretty much dead weight (vs. the Transputers that hung off the back).

Less than a year later, Perihelion went into liquidation, and a friend and I
bought the contents of the building (boxes like 'Misc Electronics #14' and
'Papers #5'). We spent the following summer holidays using the customer list
(i.e. the Papers) to flog the remaining Transputers (in the Misc
Electronics)... Fun (though slightly morbid) times!

------
jgrahamc
Ah. The transputer. Did my doctoral thesis using CSP converted to occam for
the transputer. Fun times.

There's some of my occam code here: [http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/in-which-i-
resurrect-13-year-old...](http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/in-which-i-
resurrect-13-year-old-35.html)

Oxford had some transputers from INMOS. The story I heard was that they'd been
manufactured with the die in the wrong way round meaning the pinouts were all
messed up. So a bunch (16 IIRC?) had been wirewrapped together to make some
hideous but working machine.

~~~
david-given
I did some work on a transputer at Tao --- we had a nine-node demo system;
eight transputer nodes, and one Pentium node, running as an asymmetric
multiprocessing cluster. The demo program drew Mandelbrot images by farming
out scanlines to each processor node. Unfortunately, the Pentium was so much
faster than the transputers that by the time each transputer node had rendered
one scanline, the Pentium had done all the rest...

Later, the transputer metamorphosed into the ST20, which was sold as a single-
processor embedded microcontroller, used a lot in the TV and set-top-box
market. It actually worked pretty well.

One exciting thing we discovered: on at least on transputer system (and the
details are from memory, so possibly incorrect here), if you asked it to do a
shift right by 0 bits, the processor would hang. We eventually decided that
the microcode that implemented this was doing:

    
    
        while (--shift)
          value >>= 1;
    

So, if you passed in 0, in the first iteration the shift rolled round to
0xffffffff, and kept going; with interrupts off. IIRC we calculated that it
would probably take about a fortnight to run. I don't think we ever tried it
to see, though.

------
protomyth
Atari has some fun computers during this era that were overshadowed by the
(arguably better) Amiga. The Falcon was a favorite of musicians.

Inmos sold a T-400 board when I was in college. It was another example of a
stack machine. Occam was an interesting programming language. I still have the
book for that.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
The ST was another musician's favorite, because of the MIDI ports.

~~~
jasonm23
Arguably the original musicians favorite. (From 1985 until Atari Corporation
folded up in 96.)

The Falcon came later and was unsuccessful compared to the ST.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "The Falcon came later and was unsuccessful compared to the ST."

Agreed, though the Falcon was a big step up in terms of audio hardware due to
the addition of the DSP.

To hear the difference the DSP made, search on YouTube for 'ACE Tracker
Falcon'. This is my personal favourite:

[http://youtu.be/xxXCGSJ9nT0](http://youtu.be/xxXCGSJ9nT0)

I like this one too, and it's probably a better technical showcase:

[http://youtu.be/kXzMkO83jA8](http://youtu.be/kXzMkO83jA8)

In comparison, here's a decent ST chiptune. Musically it's still enjoyable to
listen to, but the difference in audio hardware compared to the Falcon should
be fairly clear:

[http://youtu.be/RnsMz-vZFHc](http://youtu.be/RnsMz-vZFHc)

~~~
Annatar
I never did and never will understand why an ATARI ST family, meant to compete
directly with Amigas, had a three channel sound chip on the level of the C=64
SID. What were they thinking?

The AT&T DSP was light years ahead of the rest of personal computers' sound
capabilities, and is in fact still competitive today. Amazing piece of work.

~~~
walkingolof
The C64 SID is generally considered the best soundchip made.

But with a DSP you can do not only sound, but this (Atari Falcon demo)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cKRZ8QgH5o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cKRZ8QgH5o)

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "The C64 SID is generally considered the best soundchip made."

Best for the time, I'd agree, but I'd suggest it's been surpassed since. Of
course the SID still has its charm, when I say surpassed I mean in terms of
flexibility.

IIRC the designer of the SID went on to design some of the early high-end PC
sound cards.

~~~
walkingolof
It was a quantum leap, just like the iPhone was to phonemarket, nothing before
or after comes close.

And Bob Yannes went on to found Ensoniq after designing the SID at Commodore.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "or after comes close."

What do you base that on?

~~~
walkingolof
I refer to the leap in it self, not the actual chip with that comment. There
is for sure better things today :)

------
TYPE_FASTER
I saw an Amiga transputer ray tracing in person. It was way beyond most
desktop performance at the time.

[http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/prototypes/transputer.html](http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/prototypes/transputer.html)

------
ChuckMcM
Ah yes, the transputer. Such an interesting, if somewhat flawed, concept.
Inspired a lot of interesting things. Given how cheap small FPGAs are these
days, you could easily build a transputer "board" which was probably faster
and cheaper than the original boards were. Put together a few dozen and start
writing parallel software for fun (and certainly no profit :-)

~~~
alfanick
There is a "startup" XMos co-created by chief architect from Inmos (who
introduced transputers). XMos microcontrollers share a lot with transputers
design and are really fun to play with.

Cores are RISC, there is at least 8 of them, but you can link multiple uC into
a single system. Their variation on C, xC, is using channels and guards as in
occam transputer language.

You can get easily a cheap dev-kit [1] and play with the tech.

[1]:
[https://www.xmos.com/support/boards?product=17441](https://www.xmos.com/support/boards?product=17441)

~~~
rbanffy
I couldn't find anything on how much RAM it has.

~~~
FullyFunctional
It's based on the XS1. For the follow-on, the xCORE-200, the flyer mentions
twice the memory. Since the smallest xCORE-200 has 256 KiB, I'm guessing the
XS1 _might_ have 128 KiB.

There's a dev kit based on the xCORE-200, for 10 X the price ($150), but it
includes a 1 GbE interface which makes it a lot more interesting IMO.

Interesting architecture. Makes a ton of sense for embedded apps (which
obviously was the point).

------
gaius
The good old days, when hardware vendors innovated rather than sticking an
Intel reference design inside a slightly different case.

------
SixSigma
An interesting read:

It's the story of the UK's attempt to become a force in the emerging
microprocessor industry of the 1970s, told by the man who was the driving
force behind it.

In the first part Iann Barron describes how Inmos came into being and the
thinking behind the revolutionary transputer.

In the second part, which starts at the point when Inmos had just secured its
second slice of Government funding, Iann Barron charts the company's decline
and fall.

[http://www.transputer.net/fbooks/iandt/inmos_transputer.html](http://www.transputer.net/fbooks/iandt/inmos_transputer.html)

------
2sk21
Wow - I had no idea that Atari was even in this space. Talking about
Transputers, I spent all of 1989 working on a Meiko computing surface with 40
T800 Transputers. Had a glorious time writing code in Occam for the traveling
salesman problem.

------
rbanffy
Yet another wonderful machine killed by the wintel standard...

I wonder if MESS cam emulate it and if someone, somewhere, preserved enough of
HeliOS to explore it.

Edit: it looks like someone did
[http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/helios.htm](http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/helios.htm)

