What went wrong V: Reaching for a gigaflop: The fate of the famed Illiac IV was shaped by both research brilliance and real-world disasters

It was during the firebombing and rioting that shook the University of Illinois campus in the spring of 1970 that the Illiac IV computer project reached its climax. Illiac IV was the culmination of a brilliant parallel computation idea, doggedly pursued by Daniel Slotnick for nearly two decades, from its conception when he was a graduate student to its realization in the form of a massive supercomputer. Conceived as a machine to perform a billion operations per second, a speed it was never to achieve, Illiac IV ultimately included more than a million logic gates — by far the largest assemblage of hardware ever in a single machine.