What we said about the transputer (in 1985) was: 1. each transputer CPU is fast, with on chip memory and links 2. you can easily wire them up in parallel to g

What we said about the transputer (in 1985) was: 1. each transputer CPU is fast, with on chip memory and links 2. you can easily wire them up in parallel to get (10,100,1000x) speed up 3. with the Occam language, you can write code in a parallel way What people heard was: 1. a 10MIPS T414 transputer is a heavily microcoded CISC architecture and thus slower than a comparable RISC CPU. Clocked at 20MHz a MIPS, SPARC CPU will deliver 20MIPS ... but of much more powerful instructions. [various other limitations such as stack of only 3 registers v.s eg MIPS has 32 registers; flat memory model vs. data/instruction caching; log shifter vs. barrel shifter in ALU; microcoded FPU] --- so you already need 1.5-2x transputers to match the competition is speed is your aim ... I think that this was pretty fair - rather an apples vs oranges comparison 2. this device is for teams that building a computing platform (e.g. workstation, graphics machine, supercomputer, etc.) and you have software that is amenable to parallelization ... I think that this was pretty fair too 3. you can't use any existing software since there is no C/Pascal/FORTRAN compiler and Inmos will not support this (so forget UNIX, libraries, drivers, benchmarks, apps) - there was never a path such as a C compiler with Occam-style Channels in a library ... you and your customers will have to rewrite all your code in Occam In hindsight, it was probably unlucky that the transputer and parallel architectures were launched into the teeth of the CISC vs RISC revolution since it was harder to keep the focus on point (2). Even more telling was that there was no substantive market demand for this (any) parallel microprocessor (a couple of niche systems players like nCube who didn't fancy being hostage to Inmos IP). So we ended up trying to create a market from scratch. My model for the ultimate failure is that there was an internal battle between the pragmatists who said "we need to have a C compiler and port in a standard OS" (Pete) and the purists who said "any dilution of Occam will make it too hard for users to successfully parallelize their code" (David & Colin). The purists had the CEO's (Iain's) ear - they won the battle and lost the war. Disclosure: I was US junior product manager for the Transputer launch in 1985