[rescue] San Antonio, TX area rescue

[dave at cca.org]

lionel4287 at yahoo.com writes:

>Were teh CM-5s SPARC-based? I just finished a book (Out of Their
>Minds), and the interview with the founder mentioned that the Thinking
>Machines were based on commodity processors (as opposed to custom
>CPUs), and the last one (CM-5) was quoted as SPARC-based.

Yeah, each CPU was equivelant to a sparcstation-2, plus there
where some FP units, not sure on the details of those.

The CM-1 and CM-2 were much more fine-grained - higher number
of slower processors. (The CM-1 was basicly a prototype. They
made a couple, which turned out to be almost useless for real
world work. The CM-2 fixed those problems, and went over well.)

One weird thing about the Connections Machines is that lisp was
highly optimized for them - it was supposedly the best language
to program the beast in. Arguably, the CMs were "lisp supercomputers"
(a slight exageration, but not by much).

They were designed on Symbolics machines.

------ David Fischer ------- dave at cca.org ------- http://www.cca.org ------
----------- When Heaven is full, the dead shall walk the earth. -----------