On Jan 14, 2013, at 1:40 PM, John Wilson wrote:
From: Toby Thain<toby%telegraphics.com.au@localhost>
I have
a couple of J11's sitting around, and a dozen Transputers. I'd love to
learn enough electronics, and have enough spare time, to build the
support circuitry and run them.
You definitely should! I don't know much about the Transputer but if it's
anything like the XMOS XS1 CPU (same architect) it must be a ton of fun.
John Wilson
D Bit
Transputers are interesting beasts. All I know is their theory, which appears
to be small compute nodes interconnected by multiple fast message passing
links. So you can build a large multicomputer setup with a mesh of those.
For programming, you can use C or the like, but there's a different programming
language (Occam) specifically designed to make use of that message passing
machinery. Given who created it (C.A.R. Hoare) I assume it ties into his
research into the design of reliable distributed algorithms.