The Connection Machine
Danny Hillis designed a computer of tens of thousands of simple processors, each with its own memory, joined in a hypercube.
Why it matters
The bet on massive parallelism instead of one faster processor reached a production machine for the first time.
The idea came directly from AI problems: search in a semantic network and pattern recognition both fall naturally into thousands of identical small operations. The CM-1 held 65,536 one-bit processors. Thinking Machines did not survive commercially, but the thesis that many simple units beat one complex one was borne out, fifteen years later and on graphics processors.