Illiac IV

My personal interest in Illiac IV stems from my involvement with MasPar, makers of a different SIMD machine. Overviews of seen of Illiac IV seemed oddly familiar after working through some of the MasPar documentation. Of course, MasPar's idea of "massively parallel" involves just a few more than 64 processors.

My involvement with MasPar? I designed the front-end interface for the VAXstation 3520/3540 (aka Firefox). As far as I know, it was the only 3rd party interface for the proprietary bus in the FireFox.

CDC 160

I once had to move one of these beasts. It was in a shed in one of the research facilities belonging to Utah State University. Since it was a twelve-bit machine, the person in charge of the shed decided it must be a PDP-8; they convinced the professor who was a PDP-8 fanatic to take it. It wound being gutted and turned into a desk.

The massive transformer in what would be the bottom left (or was it right?) desk drawer (if it were a desk) is very, very heavy.