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I'm not sure that's true, at least if you were running HeliOS.

Right, and Fortran was used for scientific work (not necessarily with Helios?). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeliOS

Again, I'm talking about 1986/7 or so. In that time frame the T4/T8 were performance competitive with anybody's CPU. However you could only program in Occam. Huge hygiene factor.

Of course today we have golang which has much the same features as Occam and everybody thinks it is the best thing since sliced bread. And we have folks seriously re-writing dusty decks in Rust. But back then you just couldn't seriously sell a CPU that forced you to program in an unknown, fairly basic, programming language.

Also, internally we still used a lot of BCPL. So the company itself didn't eat its own dogfood in the way it expected customers to.

http://tardis.dl.ac.uk/computing_history/parallel.html confirms my memory, but perhaps the timeframe is wrong. (I rather thought Bill Purvis wrote a compiler, but it seems that was Occam for the T machine.) Thanks for the history, anyhow.

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