The book "The Connection Machine" by Danny Hillis is a fantastic account of the philosophy of the CM design. When I was in high school, I didn't have a computer, I only had computer books from the library, and TCM was a huge influence on me at that age.

This paper by Guy Steele and Danny Hillis is also a good introduction to the Lisp language they were developing (but from what I can tell never got off the ground) for the CM.

http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/paperbot/25aa007a093cd69bbf0...

In particular the language has two new operators, alpha and beta, that today we might consider flexible analogs to map (compute) and reduce (communicate). It's really fascinating how they made an algebraically closed language around this concept.

This lecture by Hillis is also fascinating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua-swPZTeX4

Near the end he talks about how this room-sized machine had a syncronous clock, and how there were bits stored in the wires in transit because all the wire lengths were carefully cut multiples of the clock period.