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From: north@POLARIS.CS.UIUC.EDU (Michael J. North)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: Re:  Where are the workstations.
Message-ID: <9002201905.AA24148@polaris.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 20 Feb 90 19:05:57 GMT
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imho, there are lots of reasons for this,

	- the transputer came out 5 years too late for it's market
	- the transputer is designed as a CSP engine, C and other languages
	    were delivered as an afterthought to Occam,  i also
	    seem to remember the compiler writer's guide wasn't
	    available to mere mortals
	- no mmu.  virtual memory is a wonderful thing, try it some
	    time.
	- i suppose there is some north american snobbery about the 
	    chip being british.  just look how much the american
	    market uses japanese microprocessors (the japanese 8086
	    look alike comes to mind but there were a ton of lawsuits
	    i seem to remember)
	- inmos didn't have the world's greatest balance sheet,
	    concern over whether your supplier would be around
	    next month would bother any rational company who wanted
	    to generate a profit (you did mention something
	    about wild-eyed entrepeneurs).  americans are notorius for
	    the quick buck.......
	- this was rehashed in this list a while back when the
	    topic was the i860, but anyone who introduces a transputer
	    based product may find themselves competing with inmos.
	    inmos also supports an operating system (i don't remember which
	    one), some compilers, and i think even builds a vme board.
	    you end up competing with your supplier -- this has
	    the makings of a no win situation.
	- another topic is that of parallelism itself, why should you take
	    the effort of getting your application(s) to run in parallel
	    when the next generation uni-processor might be able to
	    run it much faster anyway.  parallelism is often "non-trivial".
	    uni-processors may not be able to do this for too much
	    longer, but for the immediate future it's likely that they will.
	    

the transputer is really an elegant chip.  it just had a bum rap.



michael j north
north@polaris.cs.uiuc.edu
tapestry laboratory for parallel systems