I think the reason transputers didn't 'make it' is not because they were super hard to program (it was only a little bit harder than programming a regular computer), but because the price premium you paid for a transputer set-up was too high and x86 got faster very rapidly.

This is right around the time when the first 386 machines were launched and in a very short time we went from 12-20 MHz 286 boxes (and some 68K machines for the lucky ones) to 33 MHz 386 machines with a ton of RAM.

So the advantage that transputers had was eroded very quickly and I don't think INMOS was ready to match pace.

Now that we've reached the end of the line for that kind of speed increase we are seeing a renewed interest in multi-cpu fabric architectures, of which the transputer was an instance.

You could replace "transputers" with [insert-architecture] and wind up with a nice overarching theory to explain the history of computer hardware.

Is ARM ( or something else) going to surpass x86 (amd64 whatever you want to call it) in the near future?

And that these will affect all ISA equally.

Transputers never really scaled into this sort of league, they were more 8/16/32 type scenarios..

For the interested, there was also the Atari Transputer Workstation (ATW).

...Although interesting, they were expensive and didn't perform compared to the equivalent sequential machine. Given development tho, who knows where it could have gone.

Also, the auto-discovery wasn't really auto... That was the boot code probing for CPUs on other ends of links and propagating itself to connected CPUs, building a map of the network in the process (which is kind of cool).

[1]http://store.steampowered.com/app/370360/