My teen years: The transputer operating system
69 comments
·March 13, 2025eggy
nanochess
Thanks for sharing! Mine was a pretty similar experience in the eighties, because you could learn so much just by reading books and doing experiments. Recently, I got three Commodore 64 (the descendants of the PET) and I just want to type some BASIC games and start learning. I'm very humbled by the experience of writing "Programming Boot Sector Games", because like you, many people have told me about having a nice experience reading and learning with it, and I'm glad the effort was worth it.
eggy
I also bought a Vic-20 and later an Amiga 1000. Typing in programs from computer magazines. That's another thing I did working through your book rather than downloading the code. You suggest it in the introduction, and I second that! The only way to embed it into your muscles and brain. I am currently teaching my youngest chess (I'm no great player), and reviewing your code has also been enlightening. Keep it up!
kragen
This is so wonderful. I hope I can get your Transputer emulator running to try it. I wish I'd spent my teen years doing something so awesome.
One minor grammar thing: "didn't worked" should be "didn't work", because "do" in English as an auxiliary verb always takes the root form of the verb, just as "will", "may", and "can" do. Similarly "don't exists" should be "doesn't exist".
nanochess
Thanks for the suggestions! I've updated the article.
kragen
I'm delighted to have been of some service.
cjohnson318
I'm a native English speaker and the article reads very naturally. I've been learning Spanish over the last two plus years, and I'm jealous of how regular and consistent Spanish is compared to English.
bjoli
I realized just this month I miss the days of being able to crash my computer completely with a typo. Such a weird feeling. I was debugging some pcie passthrough issues this week and the feeling that the computer could go dark whenever I started the VM was fantastic. It took sooooo much time, and I loved it. Of course, I hated it at the same time. But I got the same feeling as when I was writing ring0 code at 14.
This text makes me relive it!
aa-jv
Get yourself a retro computer and you can appreciate all that joy with renewed vigour! :)
I regularly return to my old 80's 8-bit machine (Oric Atmos, FOREVER!) just so that I can remind myself how great we've got it in this day and age of near-infinite memory, the network-is-the-computer, and endless pixels for days. Nothing sharpens the mind stronger than a misplaced RTS or a failure to budget for room on the stack ..
ralphc
One of my favorite pastimes on my TRS-80 and TRS-80 color computer was to type in a simple basic program that would poke random values into random memory addresses and see how long it would take to crash or do something else.
Sometimes the value would wind up in the basic program itself and it would stop. Mostly it just locked up and I had to hit the power button and try again.
Nevermark
Ha! I did that with the first machine I worked with. A TRS-80 Model III.
Not only was finding interesting memory locations fun, it generated interesting ideas for program features.
I found the address for the line length constant 64, used by the screen scrolling loop. I think the screen was 16 lines x 64 characters. By setting the scroll width to less than 64 I could protect the right side of the screen from scrolling.
So my first games had an area on the right for a non-scrolling title, author attribution, and game state info. It seemed to be a unique feature - I didn't come across any other programs that did that.
Some of my first programs were text adventures. Looking back, I should have put a short room description and usable object list on the right, updating in response to actions. That would have been a significant improvement over having to type "look" over and over, as was typical for those games.
Crazy times: 64x16x1 byte = a 1,024 bytes screen. Total memory was only 16k -> Today that is just a 64x64 rgba (4 x 8-bit channel) icon. But we always found a way to create our programs. I had a 4k RAM TRS-80 handheld and was able to create a tiny version of Zork on that, with a few starting and iconic rooms.
tomcam
All that and he has the name Oscar Toledo. I am pretty sure he’s going to be the subject of a Wes Anderson movie within five years.
kragen
Why, did Wes Anderson make a movie about his father?
If not, somebody definitely should.
leptons
This is amazing. Nice job, I'm going to have to check this out sometime.
Back around 1985 I was 15 years old and very interested in transputer processors, so much that I called up SGS Thompson, as I wanted to get the datasheets for the chip. The guy at the company was so surprised to be getting a call from a 15 year old. He didn't send me the technical info I was seeking but he did send me some brochures. That's as close as I got to a transputer :(
I daydreamed about transputers and how they could be the future of computing, while I was hacking way on assembly language on my Commodore 64. I'd draw all kinds of network topologies between transputer chips in my high school english class. I had dreams of a system where adding more computing power meant just adding some more transputer chips. In my ideas, connecting a printer would also add more computing power, because the printer would also have a transputer chip in it to control print functions, but when it wasn't printing the rest of "the system" could use the CPU. Of course none of that came to pass, but it was great to daydream about the possibilities.
nanochess
These brochures were amazing. Just like video games, the cover promised a lot!
null
trhway
>It was 1992 when the 32-bit transputer board add-on was built by my father.
It were great times. Like aviation in 192x-193x.
dang
Submitted title was "Released my full transputer OS, K&R C compiler and utilities (1996)". We've changed that to the title on the page.
(Actually we sometimes make exceptions when the author is the submitter, and I'd be happy to do that here, but the original title is pretty damn cool and will probably attract more readers!)
nanochess
Wow! Thank you!
ForOldHack
Thank you. A ton of work was done, in typing and debugging as well as creating. While some of us were cutting out teeth on nix clones... You made an OS. This is amazing* worthy of praise from Michael Swaine.
kragen
Michael Swaine dreams of being able to do what Oscar Toledo G. can.
nanochess
Thanks! I love the "Fire in the Valley" book of Michael Swaine. I've read it so many times and always find it very inspiring.
nofool
That's hilarious
zamadatix
If the author is still reading: did you enjoy programming for "oddball" systems for the time (like the transputer) more than x86 or would you say the fun comes more from enforcing strict limitations (like fitting in a boot sector) more than system uniqueness?
nanochess
I didn't know it was "oddball". I had brochures, official Inmos datasheets, and reference books about it, along magazines articles citing it as the "faster processor in the world". I believed it was pretty popular until Internet put me down in Earth, and I discovered the transputer was pretty much dead since 1994.
I was already proficient in Z80 and 16-bit x86, so learning another instruction set was pretty welcome. The fun came from developing things for the first time and discovering how to actually do things, a 32-bit operating system, a K&R C compiler, and the assorted utilities.
Enforcing limitations was inspired by the IOCCC, and later by my boot sector programs. The type of things you do after work, just to test yourself and have some fun.
bee_rider
Amazing!
> CD path, creates a directory.
Oh, that will mess with Linux users’ muscle memory, haha.
LoganDark
Lots of hints of Dutch grammar in here:
> if you are using macOS you'll be able to edit easily the files
I find it charming though, to be honest :)
lproven
The author is a native Spanish speaker, so that would be unexpected.
I think it maybe points to shared features of European languages that English doesn't follow.
LoganDark
> The author is a native Spanish speaker, so that would be unexpected.
Huh, apologies. I have a Dutch friend who has similar quirks in their English, and the article mentions Dutch by name (in "A Dutch operating system"), so I assumed the author was Dutch or that that quirk came from Dutch influence.
For what it's worth, Dutch is not the only language that does this, I'm pretty sure German does as well, and a bunch more. So you may be correct.
hackburg
[dead]
I started programming in 1977/78 in CBM/PET Basic on a Commodore PET 2001 with cassette tape drive and 32k upgrade. I loved those days. My parents didn't understand what the deal was with the costly computer I saved up for at age 13, and why I thought it was so important. It also required many late hours on my part on school nights. I moved on to assembler and C and many other languages over the years. I had a renaissance for the low-level and small thanks to you. Oscar, I worked through your, "Programming Boot Sector Games" with much joy. Your books and writing have brought back some of that nostalgia and fun for me, so thank you for that, and keep it going! It's also resharpened some dead areas and gaps I have sustained from the multiple abstraction layers of today's modern software world.