CM-1/2 is not exactly computer, it is more of a massively parallel SIMD computation accelerator. While AFAIK the CM-1 microsequencer has some limited ability to handle control flow it is there mostly in order to futher compress the instruction stream coming from the front-end workstation (which came over two wonderfully thick 50-pair ECL cables) and most of the actual programmed controlflow is done in software on the front-end side. It's architecture is somewhat reminiscent of FPGA. But while you can freely program the individual macrocells in FPGA, all of the CM "CPUs" have the same configuration, but this configuration can change each clock cycle (see Fig 4.1 in the dissertation and take note that the ALU is essentially an freely configurable 8x2 LUT).
CM-1/2 is not exactly computer, it is more of a massively parallel SIMD computation accelerator.
Right. SIMD was something people tried doing before they could get enough transistors to give every node an instruction decoder. It's useful for a narrow class of problems where special purpose hardware or an FPGA isn't justified, but the problem is so regular that SIMD will work. This niche is not large enough to keep a company in business.
(There were a long series of strange architectures tried in that period. Transputers. Hypercubes. Dataflow machines. The Cell. All too hard to program and not general purpose enough.)
