3 Mar
2009
3 Mar
'09
3:35 p.m.
Grr, I am so jealous! I have half a dozen transputers
of various models,
stacks of technical manuals and even a C004 crossbar chip, but no C011
or C012 to interface to any of them through...
In theory you can manage without one. The first Inmos transputer boards
-- the ones used in the ITEM -- didn't make use of the link adapter chip
chip (I was told the transputer was available before the link adapter
chip).
What they did was to map a serial chip (normal asynchronous thing) into
the transputer's address space. Buffer that to RS232 levels to talk to
the host system. And configure the transputer to boot from external ROM
(not the built-in bootstrap-from-a-link). There were EPROMs on the board
containing enough code toboot the transputer from the serial port. And
of course you you sue the 4 links of that transputer to connect to others.
Writing the necessary transputer bootstrap program is left as an exercise
:-)
-tony