He worked for an early computer manufacturer at one point in his life. The completely wacky Thinking Machines Corporation, who built probably the strangest computer architecture ever commercially developed.

There were building massively parallel systems back in the 80s. Literally thousands of parallel processors, but each processor was only a single bit machine with an incredibly primitive ALU and little else. Or maybe it would be better to think of them as the first GPU builder, at least 20 years ahead of their time.

They're very good lectures, too.