The biggest factor in inhibiting widespread adoption of the Inmos International Plc Transputer has been the lack of a widely-used operating system for the part, but Real Time Systems Ltd, Douglas, Isle of Man has taken a big step towards that goal with the introduction of TransIdris, a multi-tasking, multi-user operating system for the Transputer based on the Idris Unixalike. Idris, from Whitesmiths Ltd, is now claimed to be compliant with the Posix standard, has many features of Unix System V, and includes real-time extensions. Another selling point is its small size compared with standard Unix. Initially developed for the Parsys SN1000 multi-Transputer machine, TransIdris is now being offered for use on Transputer add-on boards for MS-DOS machines. TransIdris supports parallel execution of Idris programs by separate T800 worker Transputers and Occam harnesses can also be run on one or more workers designated by the user for that purpose. It comes with ANSI C and ISO Pascal-conformant compilers and a C source level debugger, as well as about 100 utilities, including line and screen editors, file and text manipulation tools and a text formatter. It is currently available for the Qunitek Fast1, Fast4, Fast9 boards and for the Inmos B004 or compatible boards, and a minimum host configuration required is an XT with 512Kb memory and 10Mb disk, although an AT-bus 1Mb 80386 machine with 40Mb disk is recommended. Licences for from one to 32 or more Transputer systems are available, and a complete development kit for a single Transputer is UKP580, plus UKP700 for the C cross compiler, UKP900 for Pascal, UKP600 for the Mimic simulator and debugger, and UKP400 for the XA8 cross assembler. For a system with 16 to 31 Transputers, the environment is UKP1,880, other prices are the same. Real Time Systems has won a $2.3m order from Aleor Communications Corp for TransIdris.
