The Connection Machines owned by the United States government laboratories were made available to me because they were considered impossible to program and there was no great demand for them at that time.

His thesis was not accepted by a committee of internal and external examiners and thus he was not awarded the degree. During this time he worked as a civil engineer at the Bureau of Land Reclamation in Wyoming. He won in the "price/performance" category with a performance figure of 400 Mflops/$1M corresponding to an absolute performance of 3.