website/content/museum/atari-abaq-atw-transputer-800.md

title, categories, types, origins, years, cpus, params

title	categories	types	origins	years	cpus	params
Atari Abaq ATW Transputer 800	Computers	Professional Computer	U.S.A.	1987	RISC Inmos T-800 32 bits	name image company company_name specs tabs forum_thread photos links oc_id source Abaq ATW Transputer 800 /media/museum/photos/abaq.jpg /companies/atari Atari label value NAME Abaq ATW Transputer 800 label value MANUFACTURER Atari label value TYPE Professional Computer label value ORIGIN U.S.A. label value YEAR 1987 label value CPU RISC Inmos T-800 32 bits (4 mips) label value SPEED Unknown label value CO-PROCESSOR Unknown label value RAM 4 MB label value VRAM 1 MB label value ROM Unknown label value TEXT MODES Unknown label value GRAPHIC MODES 4 modes, maximums : 1280 x 960 and 1024 x 768 label value COLORS 16 (1280 x 960), 256 (1024 x 768) among 16.7 millions label value SOUND Unknown label value I/O PORTS Unknown label value BUILT IN MEDIA Unknown label value OS HELIOS photos links 52 title subtitle text image ATW TRANSPUTERS AT KODAK'S This photo was "secretly" taken at a Kodak-owned facility, notice all the Mega ST keyboards linked to a ATW station (once again obtained through classified sources). /media/museum/photos/atw.jpg title subtitle text image MY ATARI ATW 800 TRANSPUTER The picture of the main page shows the Atari Transputer card plugged onto a Mega STf. This photo shows the 'real' Atari ATW 800 Transputer station. There are only 250 (!) transputers in the world ! The 50 first models are prototypes and the 200 other ones were sold to Kodak. My (Thierry speaking here) transputer belongs to the 50 prototypes. /media/museum/photos/atw0.jpg title subtitle text image THE ATARI ATW 800 MOTHER BOARD There are three boards in the ATW : the front card is the Atari STf motherboard, & has all the features of the Atari Mega STf 4, except its SCSI port. The board on the background is the ATW board, the yellow chip is the Inmos T800 CPU. Between the two cards, there is a video card with 1 MB RAM. /media/museum/photos/atw2.jpg title subtitle text image ATW 800 OFFICIAL PROMO PICTURE Thanks to Marcus Baum for this picture /media/museum/photos/atw800prm_s.jpg title url text ATW User's lair http://www.acbm.com/atw/ ATW users mailing list title url text Internet Parallel Computing Archive http://wotug.ukc.ac.uk/parallel/transputer/ Lot of Links about parallel computers title url text Ram's Transputer Home Page http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/ Very informative page about Transputers title url text The Transputer Archive http://archive.comlab.ox.ac.uk/transputer.html The Transputer archive contains information relevant to the transputer microprocessor designed by Inmos title url text Wikipedia Transputer page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation Nice detailed page title url text Web Wiz CAPTCHA http://www.webwizcaptcha.com The Transputer and OCCAM language 33 url date https://web.archive.org/web/20230324201243/http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=33 2023-03-24

This strange machine was shown at Comdex in 1987. It was designed for graphics intensive applications taking advantage of the parallel processing capacities of the INMOS transputer.

Two models were sold: one of them was a card which could be connected onto a Mega STf bus expansion to use its peripherals (keyboard, disk, etc.). The other was a computer in which there was a motherboard with a single transputer plus a card which contained all the Atari Mega STf hardware to use its peripherals!

The motherboard included slots to add up to four more processor cards, each with up to four transputers, to enable multiprocessing.

It ran under Helios, an operating system done by the British company Perihelion, derived from UNIX but specially adapted for parallel processing).

A C language was adapted and a parallel processing language called OCCAM. Only few of these computers were sold, most of them to Kodak.