His first inspiration was the concept of “microparallel processing.” The basic idea came from a singular aspect of MAXC’s operation—what Ed McCreight had described as “hijacking” the central processing unit. Thanks to a common bottleneck in computer architectures, the processor, or brain, of a typical machine shared access to the computer’s main memory with all the machine’s peripheral devices. Because only one device could be serviced at a time, the processor was often left idle while some other component temporarily monopolized the memory. “While the disk was accessing the memory, for
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