denbeste@bbn.com (Steven Den Beste) (11/28/89)
I just got around to registering my copy of Turbo-Silver, and received
Impulse's newsletter. It contains the following rumor-quash:
"There is a company that has come out with a TransPuter, from the Boston area.
They sent us the Transputer and the Graphics sub system, we had it only a
couple of weeks. We spent some time playing with it to see if it was worth
$15,000.00. The answer that we came to was "NOPE". It had an adequate display
board that sorta worked, but only in RGB, it was supposed to have NTSC out but
we didn't find any RCA video connectors. The transputer itself was as we had
expected, four transputer chips and some memory. With some effort and a few
late nights we think that after 3 to 4 months of programming, we could probably
increase the speed of traces from 1 hour to 1/16th of an hour, something like
3 to 6 minutes.
"The problem as to why we are not going to do any further work at this time is
as follows. We don't think that thousands of you are going to plunk down the
price of a new car on a board that traces a few times faster, and to be real
honest we aren't sure that the manufacturer, (in Germany) has the ability to
punch these boards out in any real quantity so that the price of the board and
graphics system would come down to where there is real air and not that thin
stuff that only geese can breath. So now you have the real poop on that poop.
No Turbo Silver Transputer software in the near future. Remember we didn't say
never, we just said not any time in the near future."
[Oh, by the way, this quote is with permission. Elsewhere it says about rumors:
"Tell them like it is, copy this newsletter and let them read it for
themselves." --so I just copied it for a few thousand of my closest friends.]
Steven C. Den Beste || denbeste@bbn.com (ARPA/CSNET)
BBN Communications Corp. || {apple, usc, husc6, csd4.milw.wisc.edu,
150 Cambridge Park Dr. || gatech, oliveb, mit-eddie,
Cambridge, MA 02140 || ulowell}!bbn.com!denbeste (USENET)