[deviantbit]

Inmos was a disaster. No application ever shipped on one. EVER. It used a serial bus to resolve the problems that should have never been problems. Clearly you never wrote code for one. Each oslink couldn't reach more than 3 feet. What a disaster that entire architecture was.

[morphle]

I shipped 5 applications on an 800 Inmos Transputer supercomputer. Sold my parallel C compilers, macro Assembler. Also an OS, Macintosh Nubus interface card, Transputer graphics cards, a full paper copier and laserprinter. I know of dozens of successful products.

[deviantbit]

Sure you did. What were they? The only successful transputer was the T414 and it never made it outside academia.

[__d]

Well, I believe there were military radar projects that shipped in reasonable quantities and served for reasonable lifetimes.

I think I remember some medical imaging products as well?

I don’t dispute that the Transputer was ultimately unsuccessful, but it wasn’t completely unused in real-world products.

See also TI’s C40, which was quite similar and similarly successful.

[sitkack]

Hey don't shit on my retro alternative timeline nostalgia. We were all writing Lisp programs on 64 CPU Transputer systems with FPGA coprocessors, dynamically reconfigured in realtime with APL.

[zozbot234]

/s/LISP/Prolog and you've basically described the old "Fifth Generation" research project. Unfortunately it turns out that trying to parallelize Prolog is quite a nightmare, the language is really, really not built for it. So the whole thing was a dead-end in practice. Arguably we didn't have a real "fifth-gen" programming language prior to Rust, given how it manages to uniquely combine ease of writing parallel+concurrent code with bare-metal C like efficiency. (And Rust is now being used to parallelize database query, which comfortably addresses the actual requirement that Prolog had been intended for back then - performing "search" tasks on large and complex knowledge bases.)

[sitkack]

You probably already know about https://github.com/mthom/scryer-prolog are you saying we should accelerate scryer-prolog with a Grayskull board?

[hollerith]

Also, the Fifth Generation computer project subscribed to the old AI paradigm, not based on statistics.