Interesting mix...

Tony Duell ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk
Tue Mar 3 14:35:44 CST 2009


> Grr, I am so jealous! I have half a dozen transputers of various models, 
> stacks of technical manuals and even a C004 crossbar chip, but no C011 
> or C012 to interface to any of them through...

In theory you can manage without one. The first Inmos transputer boards 
-- the ones used in the ITEM -- didn't make use of the link adapter chip 
chip (I was told the transputer was available before the link adapter 
chip). 

What they did was to map a serial chip (normal asynchronous thing) into 
the transputer's address space. Buffer that to RS232 levels to talk to 
the host system. And configure the transputer to boot from external ROM 
(not the built-in bootstrap-from-a-link). There were EPROMs on the board 
containing enough code toboot the transputer from the serial port. And 
of course you you sue the 4 links of that transputer to connect to others.

Writing the necessary transputer bootstrap program is left as an exercise 
:-)

-tony


More information about the cctalk mailing list