[cesaref]

I attended Bristol Uni's Computer Science department in the late 80s. They had a room of Sun 3s which had transputer cards, which were programmed in occam in a weird folding editor. It was clearly the future, and all programming would look like that in the future (hint, not the one I ended up living in).

I also seem to remember seeing a demo of a mandlebrot set being rendered impressively quickly in parallel on a transputer based machine, which I think was a cube shaped machine. A quick look on the web doesn't throw up any obvious hits though.

[voldacar]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W17opJa9KGY

might have been this one? or perhaps the following old demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdK3PXKvYgs

[youngtaff]

Bristol has many silicon design companies based around it, and they're often credited to Inmos being there first

[criddell]

Could the cube shaped machine be a SGI Iris?

[cesaref]

Just found reference to it on David May's page, which is suitably retro html for the Inmos architect who created occam and did all sorts of interesting things like formally prove their FPU implementation (before formal proofs for that sort of thing were common):

http://people.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/transputer.html

'The B0042 board contains 42 transputers connected via their links into a 2-dimensional array. A number of them were built following a manufacturing error - all of these transputers were inserted into the packages in the wrong orientation so were fully functional but unsaleable. I had them all (around 2000) written off for engineering use and we built the B0042 'evaluation' boards! Many of these were given to Southampton University where they were assembled into a 1260 processor machine and used for experimental scientific computing. Inmos used them in a number of exhibitions (in a box of 10 boards - 420 processors) drawing Mandelbrot sets in real time!'

Sounds like the machine I remember, a 420 processor machine in a box in the late 80s was quite something.

[fanf2]

No, that didn’t contain any transputers, but it might have been a Parsytec GigaCluster

http://www.geekdot.com/category/hardware/transputer/parsytec...