Yeah, it was around the time that thread-level parallelism was getting a lot of love. As I recall, they had some massive number of cores directly connected to each other and garbage collection at least partly in hardware. They got burned for pretty much the same reason a lot of the other custom CPU hardware of the time got burned; if you could just wait for Intel to double performance in a couple years it wasn't really worth going with some one-off design for a temporary advantage.