Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My teen years: The transputer operating system

nanochess.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 70 posts

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#11

Post by alexisread »

nextts wrote: post #9
kgwgk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer

Bold. In a different timeline they could have been the nvidia.

Absolutely: https://www.transputer.net/tn/46/tn46.html

Too bad the UK gov were so shortsighted, or that Atari, instead of making the ATW (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation)

should have simply used a T212 in the ST blitter socket as a coprocessor. That way people could have slowly gotten familiar with the arch :|

People are building new hardware to run transputers though: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/369254-pre-annoucement-atw... so maybe this amazing code can be resurrected on real hardware!

Edit: Found it. This is the paper on 3d parallel transforms: https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/611934...

Later transputers also had DSP instructions built-in.

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#12

Post by bjoli »

I realized just this month I miss the days of being able to crash my computer completely with a typo. Such a weird feeling. I was debugging some pcie passthrough issues this week and the feeling that the computer could go dark whenever I started the VM was fantastic. It took sooooo much time, and I loved it. Of course, I hated it at the same time. But I got the same feeling as when I was writing ring0 code at 14.

This text makes me relive it!

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#13

Post by nextts »

kgwgk wrote: post #10
nextts wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bold. In a different timeline they could have been the nvidia.

“Parallel implementation of backpropagation neural networks on a heterogeneous array of transputers” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18255845/

I like how it isn't laced with superlatives too. Unlike today's papers that sound like a (well educated) used car salesman.

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#16

Post by aa-jv »

bjoli wrote: post #12

I realized just this month I miss the days of being able to crash my computer completely with a typo. Such a weird feeling. I was debugging some pcie passthrough issues this week and the feeling that the computer could go dark whenever I started the VM was fantastic. It took sooooo much time, and I loved it. Of course, I hated it at the same time. But I got the same feeling as when I was writing ring0 code at 14. Thi…

Get yourself a retro computer and you can appreciate all that joy with renewed vigour! :)

I regularly return to my old 80's 8-bit machine (Oric Atmos, FOREVER!) just so that I can remind myself how great we've got it in this day and age of near-infinite memory, the network-is-the-computer, and endless pixels for days. Nothing sharpens the mind stronger than a misplaced RTS or a failure to budget for room on the stack ..

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#17

Post by aa-jv »

karparov wrote: post #7

CD-ROMs and only 128k of RAM? Sorry, that doesn't pass the smell test. Once CD-ROMs were available, 2-digit megabytes of RAM were standard (and affordable) for home PCs.

CD-ROM block sizes were 2048 bytes (2k), so its not entirely unreasonable to design what we now consider low-memory devices around the technology, nor is it a requirement that huge-memory systems be tied to CD-ROM drives...

128k is enough for a lot of things.

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#18

Post by ForOldHack »

nanochess wrote: post #5
dang wrote: post #3

Submitted title was "Released my full transputer OS, K&R C compiler and utilities (1996)". We've changed that to the title on the page. (Actually we sometimes make exceptions when the author is the submitter, and I'd be happy to do that here, but the original title is pretty damn cool and will probably attract more readers!)

Wow! Thank you!

Thank you. A ton of work was done, in typing and debugging as well as creating. While some of us were cutting out teeth on nix clones... You made an OS. This is amazing* worthy of praise from Michael Swaine.

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#19

Post by badgersnake »

karparov wrote: post #7

CD-ROMs and only 128k of RAM? Sorry, that doesn't pass the smell test. Once CD-ROMs were available, 2-digit megabytes of RAM were standard (and affordable) for home PCs.

Pretty sure the ZX Spectrum (also 128k) had some kind of CDROM adaptor, it worked via the joystick port IIRC.

A quick google didn’t tell me anything so maybe I imagined it.

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#20

Post by lproven »

badgersnake wrote: post #19
karparov wrote: post #7

CD-ROMs and only 128k of RAM? Sorry, that doesn't pass the smell test. Once CD-ROMs were available, 2-digit megabytes of RAM were standard (and affordable) for home PCs.

Pretty sure the ZX Spectrum (also 128k) had some kind of CDROM adaptor, it worked via the joystick port IIRC. A quick google didn’t tell me anything so maybe I imagined it.

I think you did imagine it, yes.

The Spectrum did not have 128kB until near the end of its life. It started out with a choice of 16kB or 48kB and that was all you got until 1986.

It also didn't have a joystick port. Nor did it have floppy disks (although 3rd party interfaces existed). Amstrad added joystick ports when it bought the product line and brand from Sinclair Research, soon after Sinclair launched the Spectrum 128, based on a Spanish model.

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/57231/Amstrad-Buys-S...

Post reply on HN