Comment by deviantbit

1 year ago

Inmos was a disaster. No application ever shipped on one. EVER. It used a serial bus to resolve the problems that should have never been problems. Clearly you never wrote code for one. Each oslink couldn't reach more than 3 feet. What a disaster that entire architecture was.

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deviantbit

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morphle  1 year ago

I shipped 5 applications on an 800 Inmos Transputer supercomputer. Sold my parallel C compilers, macro Assembler. Also an OS, Macintosh Nubus interface card, Transputer graphics cards, a full paper copier and laserprinter. I know of dozens of successful products.

  • deviantbit  1 year ago

    Sure you did. What were they? The only successful transputer was the T414 and it never made it outside academia.

    • __d  1 year ago

      Well, I believe there were military radar projects that shipped in reasonable quantities and served for reasonable lifetimes.

      I think I remember some medical imaging products as well?

      I don’t dispute that the Transputer was ultimately unsuccessful, but it wasn’t completely unused in real-world products.

      See also TI’s C40, which was quite similar and similarly successful.

sitkack  1 year ago

Hey don't shit on my retro alternative timeline nostalgia. We were all writing Lisp programs on 64 CPU Transputer systems with FPGA coprocessors, dynamically reconfigured in realtime with APL.

  • zozbot234  1 year ago

    /s/LISP/Prolog and you've basically described the old "Fifth Generation" research project. Unfortunately it turns out that trying to parallelize Prolog is quite a nightmare, the language is really, really not built for it. So the whole thing was a dead-end in practice. Arguably we didn't have a real "fifth-gen" programming language prior to Rust, given how it manages to uniquely combine ease of writing parallel+concurrent code with bare-metal C like efficiency. (And Rust is now being used to parallelize database query, which comfortably addresses the actual requirement that Prolog had been intended for back then - performing "search" tasks on large and complex knowledge bases.)