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by ma2t 1489 days ago
> I heard (but never saw) that for internal development at Connection Machines each developer had a single 512-processor board to work on.

From at least ~1989 on there were a bunch of machines of various sizes and states of assembly around the building at Thinking Machines. You'd connect to the appropriate front-end and cmattach whatever geometry needed. Certain groups did have dedicated CM-2s, particularly those needing specialized configurations (framebuffer, DataVault, etc).

If you knew where the machine running your code lived, you could go sit late at night and watch the LEDs throbbing. The machine really did have a presence.

1 comments

Cool, thanks for the update. Yeah, the LEDs were cool -- legendarily good for debugging, but I never heard or saw any way to do that.