Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: eugene@wilbur.nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya)
Subject: Re: Just An Observation
Organization: NAS - NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
Date: Tue, 27 Dec 1994 22:51:54 GMT
Message-ID: <D1HrIJ.Cy0@cnn.nas.nasa.gov>

In article <1994Dec22.035054.1847@nosc.mil> anuzen@tidal.nosc.mil writes:
>A few years ago (1986 to be exact), I worked on a supercomputer project 
>using the T400s, and today just out of curiosity, I browse through the 
>articles on this forum. I can't help but notice that most of the 
>participants are from the UK or Germany. At the time, I thought 
>Transputers were the way of the future, and still do now. I wonder why 
>the Transputers never caught on in the US?

Reasonable observation.
I'd say there are several reasons why you didn't see them take off.
First, I share an office one day a week with one of the two guys who first
coined the term supercomputer, and they would bald face say that if you
project justed T400 even back then -> then you didn't have a supercomputer.
Don't bother taking that too personally it was their word at the time.

1) Availability.  People were putting together 6502s and 8086s just before your
time (1986).  What was hot at the time?  68010s and xXX86s.  Why?  They could
get pumped out.  There is a concentration of computing resources here
in the US which has yet to see comparison elesewhere in the world.  A few
people realized that the Transputer was developed about the time as the
first 68Ks.

2) Software.  Who in the US ever heard of Occam?  How was it distributed?
I remember the days of 9 track mag tapes at conferences.  It was neat.
FTP was neater, but fewer people had it.  The people who had Occam
displayed the same arrogance as the LISP people, the Fortran, and other
languages, as well as the C/Unix community.  The obscurity of the platform
and the available languages didn't help.  In 1984 there was a semi-serious
post about running MS/DOS on a Cray.  That's not joke anymore.  But the lack
of an OS didn't help.  The LISP people were a little better off than
the English in this respect.  The vast bulk of preexisting (most numeric,
but not all) software is a major issue.

3) The software climate in England is vastly different than the US.  England's
own software people knew that as early in writings as 1973 (The Lighthill
Report).  That's not going change unless some of the comments in that
report change.  Certain notable UK-software expatriots (they did their
software here, but were born and raised in the UK) reflect some of the
differences in this point.

Other lesser factors exist.

--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@orville.nas.nasa.gov
  Resident Cynic, Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers
  {uunet,mailrus,other gateways}!ames!eugene
My 3rd favorite use of a flame thrower is "Fahrenheit 451."
A Ref: Uncommon Sense, Alan Cromer, Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.

