transputers

[Tony Duell]

> 
> Speaking of transputers, I've been wanting to get something of this 
> architecture for a long time. Unfortunately they don't seem to come up too 
> often on ebay, and when they do it's usually single chips or single chip 
> interface boards. Do you guys have any idea where I should look to get at 
> least a 4 transputer board?

Important fact : A transputer chip has 4 high-speed (for the time) serial 
links on it. It can boot from one of those links, you don't need to 
provide a boot ROM in the transputer's address space.

Unless you are doing something seriously odd, you will need at least one 
board with some kind of host interface on it. Typically this board will 
have a C011 or C012 chip on it, which is a serial chip for transputer 
links. One side is a normal 8 bit bus interface, the other is the 
transputer link. Typically, that sort of host board has 1 transputer and 
some RAM on it too. The standard use (but not required) is to link one of 
the links of that transputer to the link interface chip, and use the 
other 3 links to connect to other transputers.

A typical such board would be the B004. which is a full-length 8 bit ISA 
card. There are also VME-based cards (but watch out, there's at least one 
VME transputer board where the board expects to be the VME master, _it_ 
controls other board in the VME crate, and is booted over the transputer 
link).

Connecting up transputers is really easy given the databook. Even working 
with the bare chip is fairly simple.

So personally, I'd try tp get a B004 or clone (and there were many), and 
a few transputers and get soldering...

The other possibily is to use TRAMs. TRAM == TRAnsputer Module, and 
in the simplest case consists of a transputer chip and some memory. 
Brought off the module are the links, the control pins (reset, etc) and a 
clock input (5MHz). There were TRAM motherboards, some of which contained 
a C004 link swtich IC (which lets you connect the transputer links 
together as yoy linke -- _It_ is controlled by a further transputer link 
-- and often a host interface. There was certainly an ISA-bus TRAM 
mothterboard (B008 IIRC).

Finding this stuff is not going to be easy now, alas. 

-tony