Hacker News Reader

Comment by TickleSteve | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested in transputers, you will likely find this interesting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation)

The Atari Transputer Workstation was a technological oddball of which there were quite a few around that time.

The 80's were a wonderful time for computer hardware...

View on HN

There was a range of transputer addons and dedicated systems all the way up to the very pretty and very expensive Meiko Computing Surface[1] with something like 100 (300? honestly can't remember) transputers in it. It seemed, for a while, like they were being shoehorned into everything. There was a distinct belief that transputers were the way the future was going. I think the expectation was before too long everything would gain a set of transputers as replacement to a single one thread CPU, or in addition to, much like machines gained graphics cards.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiko_Scientific#Computing_Sur...

Seem to remember there was once a dedicated page with pictures, could be mistaken, but if there was it's been deleted. Such is Wikipedia "progress".

I had an encounter with a Meiko Computing Surface (64 or 128 Transputers, I think?) around 1990, as I was studying Occam at the time. It was impressive to watch it rendering high-res 3D fractal landscapes in real time.

Ditto a few years before that - we had a Meiko box in the visuals R&D dept of the flight simulator company where I was doing my electronic engineering apprenticeship, although I didn't really get hands-on with it.

Amusingly the Atari Transputer started out as an Amiga project but Commodore wasn't interested. http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/metacomco.htm

I was at Atari when, one fine day, some folks in the UK that we had never heard of did a product announcement about an Atari computer that definitely was not coming out of our engineering group. (We were down to one building at that point, if you don't count our remote office in Monterey as part of the GEM porting effort).

I remember the Tramiels being a little flabbergasted by the Transputer announcement as well.

Wow, thanks for that tidbit of history. Always enjoy your Atari reminiscences.

I was a summer intern at the UK company (Perihelion) doing the Atari-based Transputer machines. The word there was that because Atari had invested in the UK company (?) the Atari machine was essential to include as the front-end, even though it didn't really fit the UK designers' idea of what a good front-end machine would be... (nothing against the Atari design, just that its quirks/shortcuts didn't match up with the Transputer cluster backend 'vision').

Yep, a very interesting machine, and interesting time.

I still have the Helios reference manuals (OS for the ATW).

Now that Intel can no longe snuff out competition by being one fab-generation ahead, we might have space for more interesting architectures.

I got to play with one a few months ago. cool thing!

I programmed it in university in one of our classes. The objective was to make a Mandelbrot renderer faster.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com