It looks spiritually similar to a CM-1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine), but I think WOPR predates the Connection Machine. Still, watching Wargames and seeing WOPR always reminds me of a story my college hardware prof told about one of the early Connection Machines - that the LEDs were a busy signal, one for each processor. Supposedly there wasn’t enough power to have them all on at the same time, and they discovered it debugging someone’s parallel algorithm that appeared to crash the machine when, as they finally figured out, the algorithm at one point used all the processors simultaneously.
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Huh. I always thought that there was a Cray in Wargames.
It looks spiritually similar to a CM-1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine), but I think WOPR predates the Connection Machine. Still, watching Wargames and seeing WOPR always reminds me of a story my college hardware prof told about one of the early Connection Machines - that the LEDs were a busy signal, one for each processor. Supposedly there wasn’t enough power to have them all on at the same time, and they discovered it debugging someone’s parallel algorithm that appeared to crash the machine when, as they finally figured out, the algorithm at one point used all the processors simultaneously.