23 May
2011
23 May
'11
1:25 p.m.
Hi Jochen, that's a really nice haul :)
I guess you've already found Rams page at
http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/. That should have all the data
sheets you need. The TRAMs with the T800 and DRAM sound like fairly
ordinary processing TRAMs.
I've never see a B420 before and I'm guessing it's quite a rare beast. I
did sell some of my TRAMs a while back on ePay and they sold well -
there's a fairly strong group of collectors out there so you could
always raise some funds for PDP kit if you have no interest in them
yourself.
James
On 22/05/2011 19:46, Jochen Kunz wrote:
Hi.
In a recent dumpster diving session I rescued three "IMS B012" boards.
These are "VMEbus Master Motherboards" with 16 slots for TRAMs
(TRAnsputer Modules). The three B012 are equiped with a total of 29
TRAMs. Each TRAM consists of one T800 Transputer chip and 1 MB of DRAM.
In addition there is a single B420 Vector Processing TRAM.
So, what to do with this stuff?
There is a lot of documentation out there on the net. This covers
topics like theory of operation, programming languages, libraries, ...
but no "how to get started with real hardware" guide.
I have a VME chassis to put them in. Currently this chassis houses a
MVME68k machine running NetBSD. But as I understand the documentation
on the B012 it uses the VME form factor, but has no real VMEbus
interface. So my hope to use the MVME68k (or one of my Sun3 / Sun4
VME machines) as a host is lost. It would have been cool to add the
transputers as a co-processor to my Sun 4/110 or 4/610...
If I can't get any use out of the Transputers I would like to trade
them for some more ordinary QBus stuff for my PDP-11. I need a M8061
RLV12 RL01/RL02 disk controller, QBus memory (at least 1 MB) and
perhaps a M7559 TQK70 TK70 controller.
Alternatively a MVME160x PPC VME CPU board would be nice