Some of these books are still around ih various forms, for example:

https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Artificial-Intelligence-Avro...

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallel-distributed-processi...

https://www.amazon.com/Neural-Massively-Parallel-Computers-B...

https://www.amazon.com/Connection-Machine-Press-Artificial-I...

https://www.amazon.com/Legged-Robots-Balance-Artificial-Inte...

https://www.amazon.com/Machines-That-Walk-Adaptive-Suspensio...

...and more.

Yes this article is very old, and really only scratches the surface of Hillis' genius and puts a business failure angle on it.

Here's a great video describing the architecture of the CM-5

https://youtu.be/Ua-swPZTeX4

Note how similar the programming concepts are to CUDA (at an abstract level). Hillis also in the 80s published his MIT thesis as a book: The Connection Machine

https://www.amazon.com/Connection-Machine-Press-Artificial-I...

An incredibly well written and fascinating read, just as relevant today for programming a GPU as it was for programming the ancient beast of a CM-2. It's about algorithms, graphs, map/reduce, and other techniques of parallelism pioneered at Thinking Machines.

For example, Guy Blelloch worked at TM, and pioneered prefix scans on these machines, now common techniques used on GPUs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5sM-4ODXaA

http://uenics.evansville.edu/~mr56/ece757/DataParallelAlgori...

There's also been a lot of hum lately on HN about APL, much of Hillis' *Lisp ideas come from parallelizing array processing primitives ("zectors" and "zappings"), ideas that originating in APL as he acknowledged in the paper describing the language:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.108...

What's old is new... again.