> At that point, things went crazy. There was talk of Nobel Prizes (I wasn’t buying it). There were official complaints from the French embassy about French scientists not being adequately recognized. There was upset at Thinking Machines for not even being mentioned. And, yes, as the originator of the idea, I was miffed that nobody seemed to have even suggested contacting me—even if I did view the rather breathless and “geopolitical” tenor of the article as being pretty far from immediate reality.
> At the time, everyone involved denied having been responsible for the appearance of the article. But years later it emerged that the source was a certain John Gage, former political operative and longtime marketing operative at Sun Microsystems, who I’d known since 1982, and had at some point introduced to Brosl Hasslacher. Apparently he’d called around various government contacts to help encourage open (international) sharing of scientific code, quoting this as a test case.
> But as it was, the article had pretty much exactly the opposite effect, with everyone now out for themselves. In Princeton, I’d interacted with Steve Orszag, whose funding for his new (traditional) computational fluid dynamics company, Nektonics, now seemed at risk, and who pulled me into an emergency effort to prove that cellular automaton fluid dynamics couldn’t be competitive. (The paper he wrote about this seemed interesting, but I demurred on being a coauthor.) Meanwhile, Thinking Machines wanted to file a patent as quickly as possible. Any possibility of the French government getting a Connection Machine evaporated and soon Brosl Hasslacher was claiming that “the French are faking their data”.
Yet again, one mustn't go against the "american exceptionalism"[1] dogma, that's sad to hear
The result of this ego-centric americanism; Russia able to develop their supersonic weapons before anyone in the west, thanks to the work of the silenced non-US scientists [2]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn8b3E9oUHY