Amazingly, the B5000 was ahead of its time in so many regards that you can't expect someone surveying it a mere two decades later to fully understand its scope. In particular, I don't think that the linked article does nearly enough justice to the B5000's pioneering use of multiple CPUs -- in part because symmetric multiprocessing was still very much in utero in 1982. When I wrote an article on concurrency for ACM Queue another twenty-six years later[1], the degree to which the B5000 had been ahead of its time with respect to multiprocessing was much clearer -- and I felt duty-bound to give the B5000 its propers.