Talk:Connection Machine

Image Caption

I am pretty sure, the caption really should read "Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA" 67.180.29.122 07:17, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Where are they now?

What happened to Hillis Handler and their company? Are they still in business? Dan100 12:36, Mar 12, 2005 (UTC)

Danny Hillis went on to found Applied Minds, and I believe Sheryl Handler started a data-mining company called Ab Initio. Thinking Machines is not in business -- its software and hardware assets and patents were acquired by several companies. --Zippy 01:37, 31 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Performance?

Any benchmarks available?

There certainly are - many CM-2 and CM-5 machines made it into the top 500 supercomputers list based I believe on benchmark performance. I'm pretty sure there were published LINPACK benchmarks, and likely others. --Zippy 19:57, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Key Contributers?

On the Thinking Machines page there is reference to notable contributers. Would such a reference be relavent here? Something like Among the notable contributers were Stephen Wolfram and Richard Feynman.

“Besides Danny Hillis, other noted people who worked for or with the company included David Waltz, Guy L Steele, Jr., Karl Sims, Brewster Kahle, Bradley Kuszmaul, Charles E. Leiserson, Marvin Minsky, Carl Feynman, Cliff Lasser, Alex Vasilevsky, Doug Lenat, Stephen Wolfram, Eric Lander, Richard Feynman, Mirza Mehdi, and Jack Schwartz.”

I just looked at Danny Hillis's book, the Connection Machine, and there are a number of people mentioned in the acknowledgements beyond the above list. --Zippy 20:18, 2 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

*Lisp major post-hardware product?

The main article says that *Lisp was the major product (left) for Thinking Machines once it stopped making hardware. I'd like to know more about this. I would have guessed that its other, more popular languages (C* and *Fortran, I think) would have had more users and more requests for support. Is this not correct? What was the history of *Lisp as a product after the last CM-5 rolled off the line? --Zippy 20:17, 2 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The statement that *Lisp was the major product left is wrong. *Lisp was no longer of major interest to Thinking Machines at the time the company folded. -- A *Lisp developer.

pronouncing * "star"

maybe it is correct to say that "*lisp" is pronounced "star lisp", but I think it's a weird way to put it. opinions? kzz * 18:22, 12 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It strikes me as an entirely natural way to put it.--Prosfilaes 15:17, 18 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds natural to me. Palpalpalpal 12:00, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"starlisp" is the correct pronunciation. That's how it was said at Thinking Machines in 1994-5. Somewhere I have a *Lisp reference manual that I believe gives this as the official pronunciation. --Zippy 19:28, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Lights

"The CM-5 ... had a large panel of red blinking LEDs." -- Was there any functional reason to put actual blinkenlights on this thing, or was it just a design statement? -- Writtenonsand (talk) 03:25, 28 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It was entirely a design statement. The lights were latched to a memory location per processor or group of processors; however, most of the time that produced a pretty boring display (although you could see the dramatic effects of certain matrix operations). Most of the time, CM-2s in the demo areas were left running a program called "random-and-pleasing". The CM-5s actually implemented this through a hardware switch and microcode for the LED boards! Scolbath (talk) 20:35, 24 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Size

"The CM-1 had a length, width, and height of 1.5 metres. It was divided into 8 equally large cubic sections." -- This sounds like they found a magical way to fit eight 1.5-meter cubes inside a 1.5-meter cube. Hyperdimensional? Or should this be rewritten as "8 equal-sized cubic sections"? Sue D. Nymme (talk) 16:45, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well spotted. I've rewritten this to be slightly less awkward. Letdorf (talk) 09:20, 14 May 2008 (UTC).[reply]

Why it didn't sell.

Perhaps someone could contribute a paragraph on how the Connection Machine was utterly useless for any real problems that real customers needed solved? 24.6.157.14 (talk) 00:28, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]