24 May
2011
24 May
'11
11:17 a.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
I have one, but you're right it;s not common. It's a transputer, RAM and
a special vector processor chip, not a lot more
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
I don;t know the B012. I assume it has some kind of host interface
circuity (look for C011 or C012 chipss) and maybe some link switches
(C004 chips).
> (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 got started at an ever lower level back in 1989, startign with bare
chips and wire-wrapping them. I found it a remarkably easy chip to use.
On the otehr hand, I was lucky enough to have acess to a microvax with a
link afapter card and all th software isntalled, so I have had to do
battle with that part.
>
> 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
Ah... Are you saying that you don't ahve any form of link adapter. That
is a mahor problem. I would trty to find something -- IIRC a B011 is a
VME card with a transputer nad link adapter on it, there's the B004 for
the ISA bus, etc. You cna then link the RRAMs together and hang it off
the host card.
Nomrally a transputer runs a bootstrap in internal ROM which downloads a
program from the host macvhine over one of the links. It is possible to
cofigure a transputer to start running a program in external ROM, and I
guess it would be possible to get it to communicate with a host using a
more normal serial or parallel interface (in fact the very first INMOS
trapsuptr cards used in the ITEM were developped before the link adapter
chips and have normal RS232 ports on them (!)). But it's not a trivial
project, particualrly if you've never worked with transptuers before.
My sgugestions is that you look out for some kind of host card with a
link adapter on it. That will get you started.
-tony