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