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Transputers are also interesting as a bit of economics/public policy history. In the late 1970s and early 80s, the UK government was seriously freaking out abou

Transputers are also interesting as a bit of economics/public policy history. In the late 1970s and early 80s, the UK government was seriously freaking out about the impact of computerization on society. For various reasons (insert debate here), the late 1970s UK was stuck with stodgy, outdated industries employing a lot of people, and computerization only threatened to make that much, much worse. Imagine 6 million unemployed instead of 3 (which was already extremely worrisome for the brits). The UK government launched a number of programs to try and get things moving. One, the BBC Computer Literacy project, gave us the BBC Micro, Acorn, amd eventually ARM...plus a generation of Gen X people here on HN who cut their teeth on the 6502 and Z80 cpus inside the BBC micro andnits competitors. The other was to throw money at any UK firm that looked like it could be the basis for a modern tech industry. A parallel stream at that time was the fear that Japan would leapfrog the West with so called "4GL" systems and hardware just like they had done with cars and consumer electronics. I imagine that Inmos, with some flashy innovation, must have looked pretty sexy to the UK government at that time.

klelatti 3y ago
It is an interesting piece of economics / public policy history. I think using the phrase 'throw money at any UK firm' though does a bit of a disservice to how credible Inmos's technology was. They were building at or close to leading edge RAM chips and the Transputer, although it looks like a curiosity now, had lots of interesting (not really flashy) innovation. There were lots of issues with the running of the company of course, but I think it was the sale to Thorn-EMI (a really unsuitable owner) that ultimately sealed the fate of the firm.
- kjellsbells 3y ago
  Amen. (I didnt mean to imply that Inmos technology was smoke and mirrors.) Looking back at that period, there was no inherent technological reason why 8086 had to win out. It could just have easily been something from Motorola, Texas Instruments, or Inmos. I think that one of the difficulties for government investments made by small(er) countries is that there simply arent that many native horses to back, in contrast to places like the US (then and now) or maybe China (now).
xyzzy3000 3y ago
5th Generation Computers were the thing that had people worried - essentially Prolog-style systems using logic programming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
- zozbot234 3y ago
  Unfortunately Prolog-like logical programming was especially hard to parallelize and too high-level, in that it was hard to implement efficient search/computation strategies as part of a "declarative" Prolog program. Thus Prolog itself isn't used all that much today, even though e.g. database query and other types of "non-deterministic" programming (based on trial-and-error 'choice' and backtracking) work with similar principles.

klelatti 3y ago

It is an interesting piece of economics / public policy history. I think using the phrase 'throw money at any UK firm' though does a bit of a disservice to how credible Inmos's technology was. They were building at or close to leading edge RAM chips and the Transputer, although it looks like a curiosity now, had lots of interesting (not really flashy) innovation. There were lots of issues with the running of the company of course, but I think it was the sale to Thorn-EMI (a really unsuitable owner) that ultimately sealed the fate of the firm.

kjellsbells 3y ago
Amen. (I didnt mean to imply that Inmos technology was smoke and mirrors.) Looking back at that period, there was no inherent technological reason why 8086 had to win out. It could just have easily been something from Motorola, Texas Instruments, or Inmos. I think that one of the difficulties for government investments made by small(er) countries is that there simply arent that many native horses to back, in contrast to places like the US (then and now) or maybe China (now).

xyzzy3000 3y ago

5th Generation Computers were the thing that had people worried - essentially Prolog-style systems using logic programming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...

zozbot234 3y ago
Unfortunately Prolog-like logical programming was especially hard to parallelize and too high-level, in that it was hard to implement efficient search/computation strategies as part of a "declarative" Prolog program. Thus Prolog itself isn't used all that much today, even though e.g. database query and other types of "non-deterministic" programming (based on trial-and-error 'choice' and backtracking) work with similar principles.