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I found an old memoir by someone who had worked with Richard Feynman way back in the 80's.
Those days seem to presage a lot of things that have become commercial hot topics these days -- highly parallel computers and neural nets.
One day in the spring of 1983, when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. (I was at the time a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab). His reaction was unequivocal: "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to prove it wrong—or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company.
In his last years, Feynman helped build an innovative computer. He had great fun with computers. Half the fun was explaining things to anyone who would listen.
I was alive those days; might I be as old as aristarchus?
-- hendrik
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @04:32PM
The Connection Machine (iirc) was SIMD, single instruction, multiple data. They wrote their own compiler(s) which handled parallel operations. As others note below, very good for certain calculations.
In particular I remember a demo of a 2D wind tunnel (early CFD) that ran nearly realtime...in 1980. Later heard that it had been expanded to 3D flow simulation for turbine engine simulation, including the chemistry and thermo (but I didn't see that demo).
While I visited that summer at their rural/rented mansion/office, sadly for me Feynmann wasn't in that day so I didn't get to meet him. One of the young engineers I did meet was Brewster Kahle, now well known for the Internet Archive. The other thing I remember is that it was the early days of mountain bikes on the east coast, they had some available, and several of us went for a ride through the nearby woods--very pastoral, discussing future computers while dodging trees.