Re: New ISA board to play with transputers

On 06/07/2025 10:37, Gerhard Hoffmann wrote:

Am 06.07.25 um 08:12 schrieb Don Y:

On 7/4/2025 3:30 PM, Oscar Toledo G. wrote:

I've developed an ISA board to test some transputer boards (TRAM) I bought in
eBay, I started with a prototype wired board on an ISA development card, and then I made a proper PCB in three iterations as I solved some bugs.
>
The ISA connector was just because I have several old PC motherboards (80286,
80486, a Pentium MMX, and a AMD K5)
>
The history of development is available at
https://nanochess.org/transputer_board.html
>
The schematics and PCB are available at
https://github.com/nanochess/transputer/pcb
>
In the same git you can get my operating system developed in 1993-1996.

>
Excellent!  What did you learn from the experience (besides the
perils of rushing a PCB)?  I.e., what value (or lack thereof) did the
transputer offer?
>
Could you, perhaps, have used a small SBC (arduino, rPi, etc.) and
used GPIOs to twiddle the hardware -- and a USB interface to talk
to it?  Or, was the ISA bus an important asset?

 In a previous life I had quite huge a T800 Tranputer cluster and also
did some designs that connected to it.
The ISA bus was not important, but there was a link adaptor
chip (C11?  - where is my bottle of Gerontol Forte?) that had a
SRAM-alike "foreign" side that made it easy to handle.
 In
< https://www.flickr.com/photos/137684711@N07/52631074700/in/datetaken/ lightbox/  >
the link chip is between the Western Digital SCSI controller and the
VLSI serial/par IO chip.
 Complete industrial PC/AT with Multibus2, lots of DRAM, disks, floppy, ... Thanks Goddess I had someone to do the board layout in DOS Orcad STD
on a Compaq 286  :-)
 Occam was fun. Maybe nowadays it would make a bigger impact with a
substantial number of CPUs on a chip.
 Cheers, Gerhard
 

Like an XMOS chip perhaps?
These seem to have been developed by a team that was originally
involved with Transputers.
John