I was part of the Inmos Microcomputer Design Group (working on the transputer) from 1982 till 1987. When Inmos was recruiting, number of people in the UK with

I was part of the Inmos Microcomputer Design Group (working on the transputer) from 1982 till 1987. When Inmos was recruiting, number of people in the UK with solid experience in the semiconductor industry was very limited. I had some mathematics and programming experience but my degree was in Architecture. One interesting fact is that, at Inmos, we designed ALL the hardware and software tools used to design the device: workstations, network, text editors, compilers etc. I worked on an innovative CAD system (Fat Freddy) that took inspiration from Mead and Conway's book on VLSI design. In 1987 I joined Meiko - an Inmos spin-off - which was founded to manufacture a family of message-passing 'supercomputers'. I am not a computer architect but my understanding is that the message-passing model embodied in the transputer lost out to shared-memory, multiprocessors with respect both to performance (latency) and ease of programming. All the same, it is good to see that there are people who continue to be interested in the transputer story. These days, my own interest is mainly focused on the transputer (and other semiconductor devices) as physical artefacts and I have a collection of unpackaged devices and wafers dating from those early years. I think of the 25-year period starting with the first Intel 4004 in 1971 as the 'heroic' period of semiconductor design when the layout of functional elements and interconnect was a 'handcraft'. Nowadays, with the automatic layout of microelectronic circuitry and the planarisation adopted in the fabrication process, the physical circuitry has disappeared 'into the woodwork'.