🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <?F?K#-@rpi.edu> ent...@pawl.rpi.edu (Just Another Upright Monkey) writes:
>
>I heard a story that when Hillis and Minsky finished
>building the first Connection Machine, they stepped back and
>looked at it, and saw that it was kind of dull looking:  it
>was a uniform, featureless black cube.
>
>Since they had already spent so many millions of dollars on
>it, they decided that, being a breakthrough and a
>revolutionary piece of hardware, it ought to look like one,
>and invested another couple of thousand dollars in nifty
>blinking lights.
>
>Can anyone substantiate this?

Nope.  LEDs have always been a part of the CM design, simply because we all
liked computers with blinking lights.  I would much rather look at an old
'10 than a VAX.  Besides, we were building a machine with tens of thousands
of processors; we wanted to be able to see how computations were using the
PEs.  Also, many people assume the lights were a marketing ploy.  Marketing
had nothing to do with it.  We knew we were having lights before there was
a single marketing person in the company; in fact, much of the packaging
design was done while we had few or no marketing people.

This is kind of weird: I guess I still think I work for this startup
company, and here I am talking about its folklore.  I feel old.

--Bruce Walker (Nemnich)
  Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
  br...@think.com; +1 617 876 1111

--
--Bruce Walker (Nemnich)
  Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
  br...@think.com; +1 617 876 1111