my take from reading this is more about programming abstractions than any particular hardware instantiation. the part of the Connection Machine that remains interesting is not building machines with CPUS with transistor counts in the hundreds running off a globally synchronous clock, but that there were a whole family of SIMD languages and let you do general purpose programming in parallel. And that those language were still relevant when the architecture changed to a MIMD machine with a bunch of vector units behind each CPU.