Thinking back,
the B011 was a VME cars with a trnasputer on it, but I
think it was normally used if you wanted to make a VME ssytem with the
transputer as the main processor. The VME bus was interfaces to the
transputer memory bus and you could drive normal VME cards with it.
Oh dear, now I'd better dig up my INMOS databooks and check!
When I was at Bristol Universtiy, we did quite abit with Trasnputers. We
had a microVac with a 3rd party trasputer link card (not Inmos) in it,
the developement tools (Occam compiler, etc) were hosted on said VAX.
I was building my own trasnputer-based hardware, so had little to do with
any commercial boards. But I rememebr a B001 board being around, and I am
pretty sure it ws used as the bus master in a VME crate with varios
interfaces, etc, hung off it. Whether the B011 could also be used as a VME
slave to hang trasnputers off anotehr VME processor I don't know.
To the OP... If you feel up to it uou can get around the problem of not
having a C011 or C012 link adapter chip. You need to take a 'spare'
transputer chip and configure it to run from ezternal ROM (see the data
sheets). And have some ROM whcih reads data from a host interfce board
(also mapped into the transputer memory space) and sents it to the
transputer's link hardare. You then use said links to talk to your other
trasnputers.
I am pretty sure some commercial host itnerfaces worked that way. I never
saw a schematic of the Q-bus card we had at Bristol, and I wasn't left
alone with it for long enough to reverse-engineer it :-). But IIRC it
contaisn a T2, some EPROMs and some glue logic (and probably the normal
Qbus interace chips, etc). I am pretty sure there was no C011 or C012 on
there.
But making one yourself may be more than you want to get involved with,
at least until you've got some transptuer experience...
-tony
