Landed me a great machine

From: Ram Meenakshisundaram <rmeenaks_at_olf.com>
Date: Thu Jul 15 06:33:35 1999

Tony Duell wrote:

> >
> > On Wed, 14 Jul 1999, Ram Meenakshisundaram wrote:
> > >I just got myself a really cool machine. It is a Parsytec Xplorer.
> > >It contains 16 T805-30Mhz transputers with 4Megs of memory
> > >for each node. This is something to gloat about! I am planning
> > >on running PVM, MPI, COSY, and PARIX on this baby.
> >
> > *DROOL!*
>
> Yes, the words 'you lucky beggar' do spring to mind :-)
>

I was very lucky with this one. I missed out on the first xplorer he had. Later,

he sent me an email indicating he had another one. Talk about being lucky.

> In the UK, they seem to be not _that_ hard to find. My first transputer
> was a Microway Monputer that was going to be thrown out. Then a friend
> gave me a pile of TRAMs and a motherboard for them. At the last radio
> rally I staggered home with an ITEM and a pile of other transputer boards.
>

My first transputer board were the CSA transputer education kit that I bought
when I was doing my BS in Computer Science. It was about $350 for the first board
and $250 for the second. Afterwards, I obtained two more used CSA boards, B008,
B020, and a bunch of trams. Now I have the Xplorer. The Microway stuff was a
dream
when I was going to school (especially the number smasher i860).

>
> No idea about the States. Is/was the chip common over there?
>

Well, in the US, it is extremely *RARE*. Most of the installations were
universities
and aerospace industries that had them. There weren't that many either. Most
used
the TI DSP chips, MasPar, etc for parallel processing.

Ram

--
       ,,,,
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      ( o o )
 -oOOO--(_)--OOOo-------------------------------------
|                        Ram Meenakshisundaram
|                        Senior Software Engineer
|                        OpenLink Financial Inc
|  .oooO                 Phone: (516) 227-6600 x267
|  (   )   Oooo.         Email: rmeenaks_at_olf.com
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Received on Thu Jul 15 1999 - 06:33:35 BST

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