Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/04/11/06:43:00
Anthony.Appleyard wrote:
> Sorry to be off-topic, but that looks like the sort of operation where
> genuine parallel processing would be useful. E.g. about 20 years ago I heard
> of a computer called the `Connection Machine', which acted somewhat like
> 0x10000 Commodore Pets serial-numbered from 0 to 0xffff all sharing one
> control unit; each was linked to the 16 others whose serial numbers had one
> bit different. So it could do the same thing to up to 0x10000 elements of an
> array at once. When will something like that be available in PC's?
Chris Croughton <crough45 AT amc DOT de> replied:-
> That sounds like the Transputer idea.
It is not. One Transputer is like one ordinary computer that does one thing
at a time like a PC, as far as I know. The Connection Machine ran at more or
less Commodore Pet cycle speed, but could operate on up to 0x10000 values at
once. It had one common RAM and controller. It was intended to be used with an
ordinary serial-type computer acting as its front-end.
> But did anyone really make 64K copies of a Commodore PET?
No. I said it <<acted somewhat like>> 0x10000 Commodore Pets linked ...
> (That user name of yours, MCLSSAA2, could only come from a British
> educational establishment. And UMIST has certainly been established a long
> time. I remember half of my UKC user ID from 1976 - NSC something...) Chris
M = Manchester, C = UMIST, L = my dept, S = staff, AA = me.
Long ago before desktop computers came we had a data link called MCS. This
stood for `Manchester - UMIST - Students', but I used to remember it as `M =
Manchester, CS = all the gas that people talk about computers'. :-)
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