I should explain I didn’t mean literally that you used the Connection Machine interactively. Supercomputers generally were treated as batch mode, with other machines scheduling jobs.

I think you are right about the SGI workstation being used with the CM in the background.

But still, I was disappointed that I was the only person in the theater that was stoked about Unix at the time.

All of the CMs before the CM-5 were more accelerators than full systems of their own. They sort of look like 90s style GPUs to their host systems. Those host systems were either SunOS, Ultrix, or a Lisp machine.

The CM-5 simply ran it's own Unix called CMost, and you'd generally rlogin into it from another Unix machine.

In all these cases you could submit batch jobs with NQS (a unix batch system), but you could partition the machine and interactively access it as well, and at the same time as other users or batch jobs.