I somehow cannot give up daydreaming wistfully about a personal CM-5. From a previous discussion on HN it seems it still is going to be an expensive thing to build as a toy project. Particularly because of the hyper-cube inter-connection. Not sure if the source code for star-Lisp is available. But I think an emulator lives on at Sourceforge.

Edit 1: Here it is http://sourceforge.net/projects/starsim/

Edit 2: Just doubled checked, the Sourceforge repository has no code !! But I found it here http://examples.franz.com/category/Application/ParallelProgr... @dhess Thanks a lot for that link. I just ordered a copy :)