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My teen years: The transputer operating system (nanochess.org)
117 points by nanochess 7 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments





I realized just this month I miss the days of being able to crash my computer completely with a typo. Such a weird feeling. I was debugging some pcie passthrough issues this week and the feeling that the computer could go dark whenever I started the VM was fantastic. It took sooooo much time, and I loved it. Of course, I hated it at the same time. But I got the same feeling as when I was writing ring0 code at 14.

This text makes me relive it!


This is so wonderful. I hope I can get your Transputer emulator running to try it. I wish I'd spent my teen years doing something so awesome.

One minor grammar thing: "didn't worked" should be "didn't work", because "do" in English as an auxiliary verb always takes the root form of the verb, just as "will", "may", and "can" do. Similarly "don't exists" should be "doesn't exist".


Thanks for the suggestions! I've updated the article.

All that and he has the name Oscar Toledo. I am pretty sure he’s going to be the subject of a Wes Anderson movie within five years.

Submitted title was "Released my full transputer OS, K&R C compiler and utilities (1996)". We've changed that to the title on the page.

(Actually we sometimes make exceptions when the author is the submitter, and I'd be happy to do that here, but the original title is pretty damn cool and will probably attract more readers!)


Wow! Thank you!

CD-ROMs and only 128k of RAM? Sorry, that doesn't pass the smell test. Once CD-ROMs were available, 2-digit megabytes of RAM were standard (and affordable) for home PCs.


Bold. In a different timeline they could have been the nvidia.

Absolutely: https://www.transputer.net/tn/46/tn46.html

Too bad the UK gov were so shortsighted, or that Atari, instead of making the ATW (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation)

should have simply used a T212 in the ST blitter socket as a coprocessor. That way people could have slowly gotten familiar with the arch :|

People are building new hardware to run transputers though: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/369254-pre-annoucement-atw... so maybe this amazing code can be resurrected on real hardware!


“Parallel implementation of backpropagation neural networks on a heterogeneous array of transputers”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18255845/




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