I joined Inmos in 1982 and worked on the transputer CAD system as part of a small team led by Miles Chesney. One of the things that seems remarkable, in retrospect, is the fact that we (the Microprocessor Design Group) designed not only the end product (processor, language and development system) but all of the tools used to design them: CAD system, graphics workstations, networking software, text editors and so on. I can't recall a single case of a software (or hardware) tool that was externally sourced. Whether this was an admirable trait is another question but it certainly made for an exciting life.
Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
51–59 of 59 posts
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#52One other observation on the Inmos story that I don't believe has been made elsewhere in this thread is the degree to which the company seeded the development of a number of highly innovative and successful companies in the Bristol area: Meiko, Division, Pixelfusion, Xmos, MotionMedia, PicoChip to name but a handful.
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#53Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#54> The other product was the second test chip we had made for the transputer. We persuaded IBM to use this as their next generation graphic chip, and it became embedded in the PC as the SVGA standard. Some of the oddities in the present Windows operating system stem directly from the way this chip was designed to work with the transputer. Anyone know more about this?
This sounds very much like the Colour Lookup Table (CLUT)- a classic skunkworks project initiated by Gerry Talbot and Miles Chesney that 'proved' the capability of the nascent Inmos CAD system.
IMS G170/G171. Documented here: http://www.transputer.net/ibooks/72-trn-204-01/graph2nd.pdf
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#55Still used in certain submarine sonar arrays (T9000).
Do you have any further information about this? I used the T4xx/T8xx series CPUs for a while, but never actually saw a working T9000 ...
You won’t find much about it.
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm. Wasn't Alef done by Phil Winterbottom? I remember meeting him at a party in (iirc in Putney) and talking to him about Transputers. I can't remember if he was already familiar. It was a pretty good party. Anyway, based on that evidence I suspect there was a more direct derivation than from base CSP.
TL;DR -- I suspect you're right: the Alef, Limbo, Go evolutionary path was well aware of occam. Alef was Phil Winterbottom, yes. The Squeak paper ( http://ordiecole.com/squeak/cardelli_squeak1985.pdf ) was 1985, so let's assume the work was likely some time in 1984. That would follow the Blit terminal work (paper in 1982), which seems reasonable. Newsqueak, Alef, and Limbo followed in that order. occam 1 was 1983, so…
Fire up the time machine...
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#57FWIW, Go's channels were largely inspired by similar facilities in Occam.
I think Go's channels came largely from Tony Hoare's CSP, via a series of languages and experiences within the Bell Labs group that also produced Unix and Plan9. See Limbo, Alef, Newsqueak, and Squeak. Occam was also derived from CSP, but I don't think it's accurate to call it a direct ancestor to Go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alef_(programming_language)…
Thanks, looks like you're right. FWIW, there's a brief history here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32651557/golang-main-dif...
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#58Can someone who read this article post a sentence (like just a headline) of what the article is actually about, like what an inmo or transputer is, without starting with a background life story and life goals like the article?
Makes me remember how fun it was to read Byte in the 1980s!
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-05/page/n219/...
Re: Inmos and the Transputer (1998)
#59One other observation on the Inmos story that I don't believe has been made elsewhere in this thread is the degree to which the company seeded the development of a number of highly innovative and successful companies in the Bristol area: Meiko, Division, Pixelfusion, Xmos, MotionMedia, PicoChip to name but a handful.
I was going to say TAOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Group / https://wiki.c2.com/?TaoIntentOs) but apparently they were based in Reading.
Such a shame that the UK government cannot sustain an industrial strategy. For the relatively tiny amounts of money discussed in this article -- even £125m was not a huge amount of money in the 1980s -- today we wouldn't be having this conversation about how advanced chip manufacturing cannot be done in the UK. And we could say the same about nuclear power and telecoms where the UK had a lead and chucked it away.