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From: John R Walliker <jrwalliker@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: New ISA board to play with transputers
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2025 11:16:34 +0100
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On 06/07/2025 10:37, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:
> Am 06.07.25 um 08:12 schrieb Don Y:
>> On 7/4/2025 3:30 PM, Oscar Toledo G. wrote:
>>> I've developed an ISA board to test some transputer boards (TRAM) I 
>>> bought in
>>> eBay, I started with a prototype wired board on an ISA development 
>>> card, and then I made a proper PCB in three iterations as I solved 
>>> some bugs.
>>>
>>> The ISA connector was just because I have several old PC motherboards 
>>> (80286,
>>> 80486, a Pentium MMX, and a AMD K5)
>>>
>>> The history of development is available at
>>> https://nanochess.org/transputer_board.html
>>>
>>> The schematics and PCB are available at
>>> https://github.com/nanochess/transputer/pcb
>>>
>>> In the same git you can get my operating system developed in 1993-1996.
>>
>> Excellent!  What did you learn from the experience (besides the
>> perils of rushing a PCB)?  I.e., what value (or lack thereof) did the
>> transputer offer?
>>
>> Could you, perhaps, have used a small SBC (arduino, rPi, etc.) and
>> used GPIOs to twiddle the hardware -- and a USB interface to talk
>> to it?  Or, was the ISA bus an important asset?
> 
> In a previous life I had quite huge a T800 Tranputer cluster and also
> did some designs that connected to it.
> The ISA bus was not important, but there was a link adaptor
> chip (C11?  - where is my bottle of Gerontol Forte?) that had a
> SRAM-alike "foreign" side that made it easy to handle.
> 
> In
> < https://www.flickr.com/photos/137684711@N07/52631074700/in/datetaken/ 
> lightbox/  >
> the link chip is between the Western Digital SCSI controller and the
> VLSI serial/par IO chip.
> 
> Complete industrial PC/AT with Multibus2, lots of DRAM, disks, 
> floppy, ... Thanks Goddess I had someone to do the board layout in DOS 
> Orcad STD
> on a Compaq 286  :-)
> 
> Occam was fun. Maybe nowadays it would make a bigger impact with a
> substantial number of CPUs on a chip.
> 
> Cheers, Gerhard
> 

Like an XMOS chip perhaps?

These seem to have been developed by a team that was originally
involved with Transputers.
John