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

Conceived as a machine to perform a billion operations per second, Illiac IV ultimately included more than a million logic gates-by far the largest assemblage of hardware ever in a single machine. This article discusses the successes and failures that have made Illiac IV significant in the development of computer technology.