Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: paul@walker.demon.co.uk (Paul Walker)
Subject: Re: Early Transputer References
Organization: Paul Walker Consultancy
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 07:15:44 +0000
Message-ID: <775898144snz@walker.demon.co.uk>

In article <n.d.newman-020894113453@fp83208.aston.ac.uk>
           n.d.newman@aston.ac.uk "Neil Newman" writes:

>Does anybody out there know of any early Tranputer papers. I am
>particularly interested in the development and history of the early work.

The correct answer must be to consult the Hensa bibliography. 

The following is from my memory.

occam: First published paper I remember was David May's in ACM SigPLAN,
       which I remember from editing it and succeeding in getting them 
       to publish the INMOS logo on every page!
       A few articles were published when the Occam Evaluation Kit (OEK)
       was released, and if you look up Dick Pountain's articles in Byte
       you may find something.
       I have a copy of the Occam Programming Manual copyrighted in 1983.

S42:   The Simple 42 was never actually sold, and I'm not sure it was 
       described in a paper. David had some papers published before my
       May 85 article in Byte, but I think they were all describing the 
       "transputer" rather than the S42. The ray tracing photos in the
       Byte article were actually run on S42s.

T424:  The first transputer to be released was the 424 in a 124-pin PGA.
       It was described in the T424 Transputer Reference Manual, as 
       "Preliminary Information - Subject to Change" in November 1984.

       The T424 took an impossible time to fabricate in Colorado Springs,
       partly because of politics, but also because it demanded an 
       exotic process. Much of the RAM on these devices did not work,
       and so I think a number of them were actually sold as T404s, with
       no internal RAM.

T414:  Frustration at the delay caused a quick redesign of just the RAM
       to put half the amount of RAM using the much simpler process that
       was used at Newport --- which also overcame the transatlantic
       politics problems. I think a few thousand of these were made in the 
       124-pin PGA before the world supply of those packages was used up
       and a switch was made to the 84-pin PGA that everyone knows.

T212:  This came next, not sure when.

T800:  Then this

....

Michael Poole may be able to give you more information on the early
days of occam.
Miles Chesney may be able to give you more information on the S42 and T424.
Tony Fuge may be able to give you more information on subsequent transputer
developments.

And of course none of it would have happened without Iann Barron.

Paul Walker         Technical consultancy
+44 275 844864      paul@walker.demon.co.uk

>For example I guess that the T2s came before the T4s and the T4s came in
>various flavours, but I have no idea of the timescales or the orders of
>release. I would also be interested in how the early work with them
>progressed and how much work was done before people actually got hold of
>Transputers. I heard that Occam for example was around for a few years
>before the transputer.
>
>Many thanks Neil
>
>n.d.newman@aston.ac.uk
>

