Abstract. The Inmos transputer was more than a family of processor chips; it was a concept, a new way of looking at system design problems. In many ways that concept lives on in the hardware design houses of today, using macrocells and programmable logic. New Intellectual Property (IP) design houses now specialise in the market the transputer originally addressed, but in many cases the multi-threaded software written for that hardware is still designed and written using the techniques of the earlier sequential systems.

The paper discusses the original aims of the transputer as a system design component, how they have been addressed over the intervening decades and where we should be focussing our thoughts for the new millennium.