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Inmos Dead

Inmos
KindCompany
Founded1978
Defunct1994
StatusDead
FoundersUK government
FieldSemiconductors
Sourcebitsavers.org ↗

Britain's state-funded semiconductor bet — the transputer and occam, parallelism as product. Absorbed into SGS-Thomson (STMicroelectronics) in 1989.

Created occam Inmos Transputer

The Callaghan government founded Inmos in 1978 with £50 million to build a domestic semiconductor industry. The transputer (1984) was a RISC CPU with four serial links designed to be wired into parallel arrays — occam, its language, was CSP made literal.

The vision was brilliant and the market was wrong — workstations got fast first. SGS-Thomson (later STMicroelectronics) acquired Inmos in 1989; the transputer was discontinued in 1994.

Sources

  1. bitsavers.org/pdf/inmos/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmos