I haven't seen this video yet, but I should note that "Thinking Machine's CM2" processor was a 4096x 1-bit SIMD processor.<p>Which was enough to really have CUDA-like or OpenCL-like code back in the day. Operations could be compiled into 1-bit commands to be executed in parallel across 4096 "SIMD-lanes / threads" (much akin to CUDA-threads).<p>A lot of the research from the CM2 / Thinking Machines was translated into modern GPU code (parallel prefix sum, radix sort, etc. etc.). The research done back then really lays the foundation upon today's embarassingly parallel works.<p>There were some other computers that came before CM2 of course. But CM2 + Thinking Machines is very clearly part of the great history of SIMD-compute / PRAM model of compute / Parallel vectors / etc. etc.
Having spoken to someone who was there (Steve Omohundro who wrote StarLisp), the lack of floating point and extreme parallelism were actually a pain because everything had to be written from scratch. Steve gave me an example that they wrote over 200 algorithms in a new way, including parallel regex (as I recall). So while amazing hardware and ideas, there was a sense that it was along road to purse the actual goal of AI research.
Anything CM related always reminds me of this Richard Feynman story:<p><a href="https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/" rel="nofollow">https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin...</a>
You can get a CM-1 t-shirt from Tamiko Thiel [1], and a little background [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://mission-base-creations.myspreadshop.com/" rel="nofollow">https://mission-base-creations.myspreadshop.com/</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.mission-base.com/tamiko/cm/cm-tshirt.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.mission-base.com/tamiko/cm/cm-tshirt.html</a>