Here's a thread on the birth of Haskell in 1990.[1] Simon Peyton Jones was writing about GHC supporting parallelization, and the team lacking access to hardware that supports shared memory for testing:

  Good news: we are; we have a parallel implementation running on the
  GRIP multiprocessor, with absolute wall-clock speedup over the same
  programs running on a comparable uniprocessor (never to be taken 
  for granted!).  This has only recently sprung to life, so it will be
  a while before we can report proper results.

  Bad news: it only runs on GRIP at present, so that rather limits its
  distribution.  We have access to a Meiko transputer machine, but it
  is quite a lot harder to deal with a distributed memory architecture.  The
  compiler would port rather easily to a shared-memory multiprocessor,
  but we don't have access to one at present.

[1] https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=878480