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Briefly, to program it requires an absolute understanding of how all 65,536 processors are interconnected.

The Connection Machine was the most powerful supercomputer in the world. It is a complex supercomputer and it will take forever to completely describe how it works.

The Connection Machines owned by the United States government laboratories were made available to me because they were considered impossible to program and there was no great demand for them at that time.

When I was finishing grad school, the hot new PC was the IBM 286. Bulky. Immobile. Expensive. I touched-typed easily and quickly, but nevertheless, I realized that the machine was a chain.

Then after that came word processors and it's hard to make those laugh.

You know, IBM was almost knocked out of the box by other types of computer software and manufacturing.

The microprocessor is a miracle.

I was running an assembly line designed to build memory chips. I saw the microprocessor as a bloody nuisance.

Computing technology started out as number-crunching.

One of the things that's interesting is that the PC has always had a huge amount of scalability. It was sort of the wild dog that moved into Australia and killed all the local life because it could just adapt. There used to be these dedicated devices, like dedicated word processors.