I worked on the ParSys SuperNode in the early 90's, a 96-Transputer machine with a reconfigurable network switch that meant that any 4-regular graph could be realised in hardware.

So the network of transputers could be anything you wanted ... you could configure it to suit your problem.

I learned Occam and wrote some programs for it, but one of my main tasks was to port the NAG serial ForTran library to the machine. If it was going to be used for scientific work, that was regarded as essential.

I remember one occasion when running an "ls" command on a directory not only crashed the machine, but wiped the hard-drive. The OS at the time was a home-grown unix-a-like, and the internal tables for "ls" were fixed size. The NAG library had do many files in a directory, the tables were overflowed and system memory got over-written. The machine was on the network, although it wasn't possible to login remotely, so to use it you had to be in the room. It got to the point where when people saw me coming they backed up all their work across the network and logged off ... they knew it wouldn't be long before the machine would crash and need a hard restore.

The T800 series didn't have memory protection, and didn't have floating point, so using it for scientific calculations seemed doomed. Worse, every time someone brought be a program for parallelisation, I could refactor it and get a 100 to 10,000 times speed-up on a serial machine ... the parallel machine wasn't needed.

It was a beautifully conceived machine, and I desperately wanted it to succeed, but it ended up being nibbled to death by circumstances and never found the niche it needed.

I still occasionally thumb through some of the books I have. Possibly I should donate them to a computing museum.

Or sell them.