The computer that was released in the late 1980s, that fell into the workstation class of computers, was the Atari Transputer Workstation. This computer was also known as the ATW -800. At the time of its release, the Atari transputer workstation was considered to be more powerful than any of the currently marketed computers available.
It was in 1986, Tim King was to leave his job at MetaCow.com, and he was also joined by a few co-workers, when he began his own company that was called Perihelion Software. It was this new company that Tim King had started that allowed the creation of the parallel processing operating system, which came to be known as HeliOS. One of his colleagues at the new company was also in the development stages of a new workstation that was being designed to run HeliOS.
While Tim King was working at MetaCow.com he along with fellow colleagues on several occasions, worked on the development of Commodore and Atari computers. Seeing as though Tim King would still have contacts in both of those companies, he was soon able to show, to both companies, his new transputer workstation. However, Commodore did not need the new computer as they were currently developing a new computer of their own. It was to be Atari, which would pick up this new transputer workstation.
In its most basic form, the ATW consisted of three major components. The first of these components was the motherboard; the second component was an I/O processor while the third component was a new video system that was developed by Blossom video.
When you take the ATW system, and you combine all three components to the transputer's 20 Mb a second processor links, the station was an extremely fast machine at that time. The ATW computers featured a common motherboard farm card that would allow one to hook-up one computer to four other computers. What this did was essentially create one of the first computer farms available on the market.
The HeliOS operating system was UNIX like, but then again, it was not UNIX at all. The reason that it was almost considered UNIX was that although the MMU was missing, the fact that the ATW was designed to be a stack system made the ATW close enough to be considered UNIX like.
As compared to today's standards, the video graphics card was not very powerful. However, at the time, its capability of producing a 1024x768 resolution with 256 32-bit colours was an amazing step in graphic architecture.
Original Authors: Gobel Team (Nick)
Edit Update Authors: M.A.Harris
Updated On: 19/05/2008
