U-Micro Advert - June 1989

U-Microcomputers of Warrington in Cheshire, UK, had established itself as a supplier of Motorola 68000-based single- and multi-user systems aimed at the software developer market.

Here it's moved up even higher up the food chain with the release of its Transputer-based pUMa high-performance workstation.

The Transputer was a revolutionary parallel processing architecture developed by Inmos, the 1978-founded government-funded British semi-conductor manufacturer, which had been backed by around £100 million from the British Technology Group - formerly known as the National Enterprise Board which had bailed out Sinclair in 1978.

By 1982 Inmos was providing more than 80% of the world market for 16K static RAM, but despite that the company still managed to report a £17.3 million loss for 1981 and required much in the way of state aid to keep going, eventually sucking up over £200 million of government money before it was sold in the Autumn of 1984 without ever becoming profitable^[1].

U-Micro's pUMa workstation shipped with a Motorola 68020 as a host CPU, with up to 64 Inmos T800 Transputers - each of which supported floating point maths and ran at up to 25MHz.

This would have made a fully-specced machine an awesome piece of kit, however each T800 retailed for nearly £300 when released in 1987, so a fully-provisioned workstation would clock in at a minium of £17,000, which would be around £54,800 in 2024.