You may be interested in the discussion from the last time this was submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898569

Related discussions can be found with this search:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=transputer

In particular, in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898667 I wrote:

    I used to program a 96-processor machine. It could do
    what were for the time some quite amazing things in
    quite a small package. The interconnections were
    dynamically reconfigurable, so you could make the mesh
    of processors match the mesh of your problem (within
    limits) and avoid bottlenecks getting data from one
    place to another.

    Very cool, very advanced, and no one seemed to "get it."

    But it was impossible to get programmers to understand
    how to write programs for it, and it was impossible to
    get problem domain experts to write decent programs at
    all. Every problem people brought to me to get
    parallelised was trivially re-written to run tens,
    sometimes hundreds of times faster. It was a solution
    looking for a problem that never showed up.

    I learned a lot from that project, some of which is
    still in action today, about programming large,
    multi-processor systems. But I still remember Occam
    (and its friends (yes, it had friends)) with some
    fondness.