25 May
2011
25 May
'11
10:25 a.m.
On Mon, 23 May 2011 21:25:26 +0100
James Wilson <james at machineroom.info> wrote:
Are they? I;ve got anumber of them, both as TRAMs and bare chips.
Hi Jochen, that's a really nice haul :)
Yes. I know what Transputers are and that they are very, _very_,
_*very*_ rare. Really rare, not in the ePay sense "rare". The bigger was my surprise to find this stuff in a dumpster.
And yet you just said that you know waht a transputer is...
Basically (and this is what the data sheets don't tell you), it's a
microcontroller. It's a CPU, RAM, ROM (a bootstrap program) and I/O (4
transputer links) on one chip. It's designed for parallel porcesing, you
can either have several processings running on one chip (timesliced, of
course), or on separate chips commuinicating via the links. The software
changes in Occam to go from one to the other are very minor.
The chip has an external memory bus, and generates the refresh address for
DRAMs. The meory control signals are configruable. Adding external
memory (even DRAM) or I/O to these devices is very easy, at lerast on the
common T4s and T8s. There's one member of the T8 family (I forget the
number, it's either T801 or T805) that was optimised to use SRAM only and
has a somewaht faster memeory cycle time than the other members of the
family, but I would be surprised if you'd got that one.
The TRAM (TRAnsputer Module, BTW) communcated with the outside world via
the links only. You don't have access to the memory bus. If you use the
bare chip you do.
As for what you might use them for, I guess it's more like 'what do you
use any computer for' :-)
-tony
I guess you've already found Rams page at
http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/.
... and a few other pages as well.
That should have all the data sheets you need.
The problem is: Datasheets don't tell me _what_ I can do with this
stuff and how to do it. Datasheets cover a lot of small details. I am
missing the "big picture" that gives me an overview.