For fans of computing history and/or Feynman, this article about his time with, and contributions to, Thinking Machines and the Connection Machine is a great read!
As a developer you had explicit access to them, so you could use them for debugging. A lot of times, they were just running an RNG to look cool though.
There is no documentation of what the LEDs were _actually_ doing. There are descriptions, like 'Random and Pleasing is an LFSR', but no actual information that maps to actual pixel coordinates spaced in time. Nearly zero code.
I'm saying this because I need this information, and the fastest way to get information is to state that it's impossible or doesn't exist.
Worked on the CM-1 and CM2. I felt they were awful buggy. At one point they asked if they could use my code to run as a diagnostic, it would break the log() function on occasion.
For fans of computing history and/or Feynman, this article about his time with, and contributions to, Thinking Machines and the Connection Machine is a great read!
https://longnow.org/ideas/richard-feynman-and-the-connection...
As a developer you had explicit access to them, so you could use them for debugging. A lot of times, they were just running an RNG to look cool though.
I'm saying this because I need this information, and the fastest way to get information is to state that it's impossible or doesn't exist.
Reposting some links from a recent Jurassic Park thread -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4kBRC2co7Y&t=65s (Jurassic Park)
The LED panel is gorgeous:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Ko4qBkEcBM (render)
A lot of people have replicated or restored these:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=qm6w57ZcJZQ
https://www.housedillon.com/posts/resurrected-led-panels/
The Cray fluorinert fountains were way cooler :)