In 1988 a friend and I presented at the 3rd Conference on Hypercubes and Concurrent Computers. We had spent the summer and fall programming an Intel Scientific

In 1988 a friend and I presented at the 3rd Conference on Hypercubes and Concurrent Computers. We had spent the summer and fall programming an Intel Scientific Hypercube. Fractal calculations, heat diffusion, chemical reactions, that sort of thing. Used to take us 20 minutes a run. We’re on the vendor display floor walking around, talking to folks, watching demos. A guy has a board in an expansion board in his desktop computer. The cover is off and he’s pointing out the 2 transputer chips on it. Meanwhile the display screen is filling out a familiar drawing of a fractal. I ask how long it took them to render the drawing. “Oh, no, it’s doing that work now.” A cute little board readily outstripping our refrigerator sized machine back home. I ended up talking with David May. The thing he seemed most proud of at the moment was their floating point work. They had written a description of their new floating point unit in Occam. They had tested and debugged it. They had formally proved the implementation of a standard (IEEE 754?). And then they had built the silicon. I returned home with a set of inmos manuals. Never could get anyone back at uni to see the potential. Sigh. Still, at the moment I knew I was truly in the presence of the state of the art.