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On Fri, 18 Sep 2009, Rob Beard wrote:
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
Aaaahhhh yes. I just hadn't associted Atari with them. ...
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)
...
I see, so they were basically machines that did really quick maths calculations?
For the time. That and their speed of passing data to each other - so you could run them in various ways, although most people just daisy-chained them together in a line as that was easiest before the meiko switch... (Wiring a transputer backplane was a nightmare - 4 wires per link)
Presumably they didn't run things like Jet Set Willy then?
err no. :) Other than that Atari, I suspect there were no general purpose "PC" type boxes made with them. They had plug-in ISA cards for PCs and a few other supercomputer companies making big boxes out of them.
I worked for Meiko from ealy '88 to late '95. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiko_ScientificThis: http://unicorn.drogon.net/cs2.256.gif is the only photo I have of some of the stuff I did there - and there's not a transputer in it... That's the 256 node monster I helpd build for LLNL. To give you an idea of scale, It's nearly 2m high. Those 8 black boxes hold a RAID controller and 20 x 4GB SCSI drives arranged as 4 LUNs of 4 drives each...
Gordon -- 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