The Bristol Curse: How the UK lost its CPU technology edge

Many of our elder readers, those in their 30's and 40's, may remember a really lovely microprocessor family - a kind of wet dream from our days of youth. Transputer was something truly special for a CPU some 25 years ago: they went 32-bit at the same time as Motorola 68020 and Intel 386, had comparable performance despite a unique 3-register & on-chip memory model, and... Every CPU had four full speed links to other CPUs & beyond, something you only see in Intel CPUs in 2007 [even the ever-ahead Alpha only had such stuff in Year of the Millennium Bug 2000]. The 32-bit Transputers of the mid-'80s, the T414 and T800 were followed by a delayed T9000, and then, supposedly after certain funding cutbacks, there was nothing more.