🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug11.214207.16247@tera.com> bob@tera.com (Bob Alverson) writes:
>Having just read Gordon Bell's article on supercomputers in the latest
>CACM, I have to ask: Is Bell financially associated with KSR?

Bell and Henry Burkhardt III (founder, and until recently, chairman of KSR)
were both involved with Encore. I believe they were both founders.  During
the period I worked at KSR, Bell showed up several times. On the other
hand, I believe Bell also showed up at Thinking Machines from time to time.

I don't know about any financial association Bell has with KSR or TMI.

There was an article in a magazine called (I believe) "Upside" in the last
year. The magazine appeared to be oriented towards technology-following
venture capitalists. My recollection of the opinions from that article
(glad to hear any others):
 - the original Connection Machine architecture was neat, using many many
   simple processors
 - the KSR architecture is neat, using a smaller number of more complex
   processors
 - the CM5 is a betrayal of the original CM architecture
 - insults were offered by Bell, Burkhardt, and Hillis
 - some other heavy (Grosch?) was quoted; I believe also anti-CM5
 - there is some kind of "bet" (involving Bell) about which machine type
   will triumph

I found the opinions expressed in the article to be amazingly "hard"; I
didn't see that they were justified. (However, I'm no visionary, and there
aren't any giants nearby who will let me stand on their shoulders.)
Certain people like to make wild long-shot predictions and
characterizations: if they are right, then the people point back to the
prediction, and are dubbed prescient; if they are wrong, well... who's
counting how often they are wrong?

There have also been several articles about KSR in the Boston Globe
business section where somewhat similar opinions were voiced.

According to the quarterly report I just received, KSR has delivered the
second level interconnection and has run a system of 128 CPUs. I believe
Cornell will have two 32-processor groups connected by a second-level
interconnect.

(I obviously have some financial interest in KSR, but nowhere close to
the America-3 level...).

-----
E. N. Kittlitz                                          kittlitz@world.std.com
contracting at OSF, not representing their positions.   kittlitz@osf.org