At some point in planning this project, I stubbornly declared to nobody in particular that the hardware in question had to be era-appropriate and suitably exotic. Preferably something used in spaceflight. Something not commonly found in home or business computing. Something Cold War-era. Definitely not a modern microcontroller.

Enter the Transputer.

Used in spaceflight? Check.

Era appropriate? Check.

Exotic? Double-check.

Transputers were an early technology from the "golden era" of massively parallel computing (say, the early 80s). They introduced some groundbreaking concepts that are still used today, even though not many people have heard of them. I'm not going to dwell on the fine details here, but look 'em up. Also check out their modern descendant, the XMOS microcontroller.

So transputers (the OG ones, not the XMOS descendant) are what's being used on the American side of this beast. The Soviet side will be sporting something a little different, more on that in a future post.

As one of the first steps in this project, I've been re-implementing the Simplified Perturbations Models on INMOS transputers (props to those who have come before me on more standard platforms, and from whose work I'm drawing heavily). The models were published in 1988, the transputers came out in 1985, and the frustratingly-ancient INMOS C compiler I'm using was published in August 1990. As the screenshot attests, making some real progress despite the challenge of dealing with ancient high-tech gear. The code that's complete thus far compiles and is up and running on an emulator, with real transputer hardware hopefully not far behind!