It's a good book, but with a heavy emphasis on design at the logic level.

(James Thornton, the author, is the engineer that helped Cray's designs become real, while at CDC. He focused more on detailed execution of the design, etc.)

Thank you for sharing this. I'm especially impressed by the gorgeous diagrams. My favorites are on pages 67, 87, 142, and 170. At first I thought they were all hand drafted until I reached the diagram on pg 170, which has dithered grey filled table cells. Does anyone know what method or software might have been used for generating diagrams like these? The publishing date is 1970 and AutoCAD didn't get released until 1982.

In the days of hand-setting you could buy books of dithering (half-tone) printed on plastic film which you would cut and press onto a page. Some brands were Letratone and Zip-A-Tone, but it was generically called shading film.

Here's a 1974 Zip-A-Tone catalog: https://www.peculiarmanicule.com/zipatone

Here's an example of modern use of zipatone for manga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2U4EfKCfjI

Thank you! This is exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for.