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Gordon Henderson wrote:
From what I have read, Atari did build one which was controlled by an Atari STOn Fri, 18 Sep 2009, Rob Beard wrote:T9000? Wasn't that one of the Cyborgs from the future?Heh...I've read about these Transputers, I believe Atari had one, but I never did find out exactly what they did?I don't think there was one in an Atari.. They were 68000 weren't they?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/16bits/transputer.html
They were basically 32-bit microprocessors with an on-board concurrent processing engine, and 4 "links" which were bi-directional low latency, high speed (for the time) communication devices.I see, so they were basically machines that did really quick maths calculations?The instruction set was variable width and they had a small amount of on-board fast RAM (a few KB) and could access up to 4GB of DRAM. (minus the on-board stuff).It had a 3-level stack arcitecture, (ie. no registers as such) and had a crude scheduller on-board to allow it to run "parallel" processes.You traditionally programmed them in Occam, but inmos eventually released the "compiler writers guide" and we had a C compiler.The T800 had an on-board FPU which ran at 1 MFlop (IIRC) That plus the ability to move data quickly gave them and edge for a while in scientific computing. We built some rather large boxes full of them once upon a time... (early 90's)The T9000 was supposed to have an MMU and was faster with more bells & whistles, but it never really made it. The people I was working with (Meiko Scientific) abandoned it as a compute element, used it as a comms device until they built their own comms chips and had moved onto Sparcs...Another british success doomed to failure ... Gordon
Presumably they didn't run things like Jet Set Willy then? Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html