A transputer is a type of computer chip from the 1980s. What made it special: each chip had its own memory and its own built-in links for talking to other chips. So you could join many of them together, and they would all work on different pieces of a job at the same time. That is the idea students should hold on to — a normal chip of that time did one thing after another, while a room full of transputers did many things at once. The word was mostly used by engineers and computer scientists, in Britain especially; the chips were made by a British company called Inmos. You will meet this word in old computing books, in the history of parallel computing, and almost nowhere else today. The chips are no longer made, so if a student uses this word about a modern computer, people will be confused. It is a museum word now, but a famous one — the ideas in it did not die, they came back inside today's multi-core processors, where one chip holds several 'brains' working side by side.

傳輸機／處理器晶片（1980年代英國Inmos推出的平行運算晶片，中文多半直接講 transputer，沒有通行的固定譯名）