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posted by martyb on Monday December 17 2018, @09:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the Ancient-History dept.

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


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @08:44PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @08:44PM (#775547)

    As I recall, she got the job because of Harvard & MIT connections? Lots of people from those schools wind up doing something other than what they majored in. She may have had something do to with the external styling of their cabinets? These were pretty cool, back in the day when the number and arrangement of der blinken lights had a lot to do with supercomputer sales (Crays also had dramatic styling).

    Looking at wiki, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation [wikipedia.org] and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Handler [wikipedia.org] The main TMC wiki article says she was forced out a few years before TMI went bankrupt--but maybe that isn't the full story?

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday December 17 2018, @09:10PM

    by suburbanitemediocrity (6844) on Monday December 17 2018, @09:10PM (#775559)

    One of the coolest things I've seen was a Y-MP installation. The machine was in the center of a small mat black room with black raised floor panels. It was florescent pink fuchsia illuminated by a ring of track lights and in the corner was the SGI Crimson terminal graphics display. It had a mind blowing 128MB of RAM! (The Crimson, not the Cray)