What Happened on September 7th

The first large parallel processing computer, ILLIAC IV, ends its nearly decade-long life at the University of Illinois. In 1966, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contracted the University of Illinois to build the ILLIAC IV, which did not operate until 1972 at NASA's Ames Research Center.

ILLIAC IV achieved a computation speed of 200 million instructions per second, about 300 million operations per second, and 1 billion bits per second of I/O transfer via a unique combination of parallel architecture and the overlapping or pipe-lining structure of its 64 processing elements.