Here's a thread on the birth of Haskell in 1990.[1] Simon Peyton Jones was writing about GHC supporting parallelization, and the team lacking access to hardware that supports shared memory for testing:
Good news: we are; we have a parallel implementation running on the
GRIP multiprocessor, with absolute wall-clock speedup over the same
programs running on a comparable uniprocessor (never to be taken
for granted!). This has only recently sprung to life, so it will be
a while before we can report proper results.
Bad news: it only runs on GRIP at present, so that rather limits its
distribution. We have access to a Meiko transputer machine, but it
is quite a lot harder to deal with a distributed memory architecture. The
compiler would port rather easily to a shared-memory multiprocessor,
but we don't have access to one at present.
