A computer that expands your vision by looking at the whole problem at once | Hacker News Reader

A computer that expands your vision by looking at the whole problem at once

computerhistory.org

64 pointsgone3513 comments

Needs (1986) in the title. But if you add references to deep learning and metaverse, replace the font with Helvetica, and add a few flatly shaded hand-drawings of a cute animal mascot, this could actually be printed today.

The marketing department was given free reign on this one.

Is this the machine that Richard Feynman was working on?

I believe he was hired by TMC to work on some topological problems for a massively parallel computer around a similar time.

https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin...

>>> We were arguing about what the name of the company should be when Richard walked in, saluted, and said, "Richard Feynman reporting for duty. OK, boss, what's my assignment?" The assembled group of not-quite-graduated MIT students was astounded.

After a hurried private discussion ("I don't know, you hired him..."), we ...

Fascinating! Thank you for the reference. The Connecting Machine looks like a nerd dream. Massively parallel with a high level language and API. I believe we can see Symbolics OS in the OP PDF.

I wonder what went wrong with the vision for it not to come to fruition. Hopefully not just a “boring” technological limitation.

For the rabbit hole divers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine

I love a matrix of red flashing dots, but did these serve a real purpose on machines like this? Feels quite obtuse as a means of delivering feedback. Especially since a machine like this could drive a comparatively information-dense CRT display.

It was to look impressive tbh. I love these units.

The LEDs, iirc, were tied to the processors being active or accessing memory or something. I forget exactly what. It wasn’t really for information purposes but for looking impressive.

And impressive it is. There’s one at a museum in GA that is wired up to randomly blink the LEDs and it’s the best thing ever lol

According to Wikipedia:

“ The panels were used to check the usage of the processing nodes, and to run diagnostics.”

It is however nice to see that the overly inflated claims of each new piece of tech is not a modern disease

(by modern of course I mean the past six months)

Whatever happened to massive parallelism anyway? SMP seems to have killed it, but curious what you guys think?

It became your GPU.

Were they building a FPGA, DPU, or graph processing unit?

They knew a lot more about computing than I expected.

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