That WTF article was wrong on a few counts --- the Connection Machine not only ran Fortran, but Thinking Machines engineers were on the Fortran 9x standards bod

That WTF article was wrong on a few counts --- the Connection Machine not only ran Fortran, but Thinking Machines engineers were on the Fortran 9x standards body, and I think one of Thinking Machines' Gordon Bell prizes for parallel computing was won by a Fortran program (a seismic data code from a petroleum company). I believe Thinking Machines faded away for the same reason Cray did --- its supercomputers were fine for doing physics, and a few sales a year to the national labs could sustain a company for a long time. But the end of the Cold War reduced the demand for such machines and they weren't successful in their attempts to shift to commercial applications. The early Connection Machines were array processors, not that different from GPUs today. Later machines were SPARK-based. Both systems relied on UNIX front-ends.