12 Aug
2009
12 Aug
'09
9:14 a.m.
On Tue, 11 Aug 2009, Josh Dersch wrote:
Hi all --
Is there a good site/documentation covering the ins and outs of Transputer
hardware? (Or can anyone here help?) I'm interested in building a small
Transputer setup to play around with but I can't find a good guide covering
what's necessary and what hardware works with what, etc.
First of all, check out:
http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/
if you haven't already. If you are looking for books, "Transputer
Instruction Set -- A compiler writer's guide" is very good, it will tell
you everything you need to know about the ISA. I can dig up some more book
titles if you like, I have about 10 of them all told...
AFAICT, all transputer hardware was more-or-less custom, due to the low
volume of production. The only hardware standard I am aware of (besides
the serial link and the CPU pinout) is the TRAM.
Of course, finding the hardware is probably going to
be the major issue here
:). There are some TRAMs on ebay right now (item 220464801141) but I need
more hardware to actually interface it with a PC, etc... are there any good
sources for this hardware other than waiting for something to show up on
eBay?
My experience has been that you can find the chips, and you can find
literature, but interfaces and working systems are pretty much unobtanium
at this point. I am building my own ISA to transputer serial link
interface, hope to have it working in a year or so :-/ My eventual goal is
to write a fast emulator.
Alexey