Annotated CSA Mandelzoom loader worm

[Tom Stepleton]

I've carried out a close reading of the "worm" in the CSA Mandelzoom source code: this is the code that distributes itself across a Transputer network and then loads and executes programs distributed to it by a host computer. The worm itself is not specific to Mandelzoom --- you could use it to load other programs if you wanted to.

The network initialisation and worm code are in three files, executed in this order:
SRESET.TAL -- reset the Transputer network
FLBOOT.TAL -- main worm and bootstrap loader
FLLOAD.TAL -- full loader for larger programs

I've annotated these source files with a play-by-play of what the worm is doing. The annotated files are found at the gist link below, regrettably in the opposite order to what's listed above:

https://gist.github.com/stepleton/e0181ecd11ade19124a2956da614caab

I hope this might be of interest to the rare enthusiast out there,
--Tom

[James Wilson]

Hi Tom I also had to work through the loader a few years back to make it work on a large T425 network. That network has some buffering on specific sets of links which broke the original code so it's also had a major rework! See https://github.com/machineroom/T-Mandel