Hacker News Reader

Comment by matt2000 | Hacker News Reader

matt2000

Side note, the Connection Machine is pretty much the coolest looking computer ever: https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/story/73 It looks exactly to me what a powerful and slightly scary computer from an 80's movie looks like.

View on HN

I mentioned this last time around [1], Tamiko Thiel worked with Feynman and Hillis at thinking machines and is responsible, amongst many other things, for how cool the CM-1 and CM-2 looked.

Also, the T-shirts! [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37688340

[2] https://www.tamikothiel.com/cm/cm-tshirt.html

Ah, I always wondered what t-shirt he was wearing in one of my favourites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

Well, my CM t-shirt is getting somehow worn out, I probably should order a new one.

And it was designed after the T-shirt that feynman wears on one of his most known pictures [0]. BTW: there we still have a nonfunctional CM which we equipped with LEDs to put fun games on it at the CS faculty in Karlsruhe [1]

[0] https://www.tamikothiel.com/cm/cm-tshirt.html [1] https://www.teco.edu/~diener/

They were apparently influenced by the WOPR from "War Games." Danny Hillis wanted to sell into the Pentagon.

You can get a beautiful poster of it from https://www.docubyte.com/projects/guide-to-computing/ (scroll to the bottom).

I've got docubyte's poster of the PDP-7 and it's great.

The CM-5 did literally make an appearance [1] in Jurassic Park. Not the 80s, but 1993, so close.

[1] http://www.starringthecomputer.com/snapshots/jurassic_park_t...

The blinkerlights panel isn't even functional. But still cool looking .

At the computer museum in Alpharetta Georgia, none of the computers are on but the connection machine panel is on.

The blinken lights panel on the original machine was functional, each small cluster of processors controlled one LED and there was a microcode instruction for latching the LEDs.

We found this museum completely by accident on a visit to the US, and it is a delight. When I saw the Connection Machine all lit up, I squealed :)

It seems like the reason it's on like that is because it used to belong to the NSA so they took all the insides out and destroyed them when the machine was donated. The blinkenlights are driven by Raspberry Pis or something similar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com