The following information is to the best of my knowledge correct, but is in sense authoritative. If anyone knows any better, then I am eager to hear from them.
About the ATW800
The ATW800 was first introduced, under the name ABAQ, at the COMDEX show in Las Vegas in November 1987. Depending on which version of Atari's documentation you read, either 50 prototypes were released in May 1988, and 300 production machines in May 1989, or else there were 100 prototypes and 250 production machines. In either case it would appear that 350 machines were built in all. In 1995 ACN in the Netherlands held what appears to have been the final "closing-down sale", and of course Atari no longer exists as a company: so ATWs are now only obtainable second-hand.
The ATW800 was produced in collaboration with the U.K. company Perihelion, a.k.a. Distributed Systems Limited; they appear to have been responsible for the hardware design (as evidenced by the copyright markings on the circuit boards), and their operating system "Helios" (a distributed un*x) was bundled with the ATW. Alas, Perihelion are no longer with us, but Olivier Aichelbaum has told me that in his final correspondence with them Perihelion granted permission for Helios to be distributed freely on a non-profit basis. I have therefore made a copy of Helios 1.3 available here. You should read the instructions in conjunction with my guide to getting started.
The ATW800 hardware
The ATW800 comes in a rather imposing under-the-desk maxi-tower casing (see below for photos). The basic configuration consists of
aformentioned case and power supply (how many Watts? Dunno, off-hand)
the "I/O server", a modified MegaST board featuring the "Morpheus" SCSI interface;
the main transputer motherboard, with a 20 MHz T800 and 4 MB of RAM;
a video/X11 card, based around the "Blossom" chip, capable of
1280x960x16 colours out of 4096
1024x768x256 colours out of 16.7 million
640x480x256 colours out of 16.7 million, two screens
512x480x16.7 million
all at a refresh rate of 60 Hz non-interlaced
expansion slots for
up to four transputer farmcards, each holding either one T800 with 4 MB of RAM or four T800s with 1 MB each
a crossbar switch to allow software-selectable configuration of the T800s
a SCSI interface which can be directly accessed by a transputer, bypassing the MegaST "I/O server".
Thus a fully-equipped ATW800 could contain 13 transputers (260 megaflops) and 16 MB of RAM.
More images and links can be found here :
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http://atw800.complicated.net/images.html
And Google , wikipedia will supply more information.
