The talk will describe a related sequence of projects including some early, very bold projects that profoundly influenced the field (and my career) even as some of them failed. The speaker was directly involved with several of these projects and very familiar with all of them. The talk includes a personal perspective of what worked and what didn't, the historical threads of some ideas and lessons learned as well as some system artifacts we may want to reexamine. The talk concludes by briefly describing the current challenge of universal parallel computing and suggesting some approaches for working on it.