[manyturtles]

Doing a CS degree in UK in the mid nineties the parallel computing course was taught in Occam, on Transputer simulators (and a handful of Transputers). Seemed anachronistic at the time as the Transputer had been heavily hyped a decade or so before as a giant advance in computer architecture that would enable hugely powerful machines to be built. Toward the end of the 80s the Meiko Computing Surface was occasionally mentioned, and the September 1988 issue of Personal Computer World cover story -- "The Desktop Mainframe arrives" -- was about the Microway Multiputer, which could scale to something like 100 Transputers in a single workstation chassis.

It never did take the world by storm, though, and it seemed completely irrelevant as a practical architecture by the mid 90s. But I did like the elegance of parallelizing code in Occam. Code blocks were introduced with SEQ or PAR, with the behavior you'd intuitively expect: everything in a SEQ block was run sequentially, everything in a PAR block could be run in any order, and (if memory serves) was automatically and transparently distributed across whatever set of Transputers it was running on. Neat.

[lttlrck]

I did an Occam course in 92/93 at Portsmouth - I absolutely loved it. We also did Ada which I enjoyed immensely but Occam is the one that sticks in my mind due to the powerful primitives.