The PDP project was very early - relevant in term of neural net history of course, but hard to see much there relevant to today's large models other than Hinton's reinvention of SGD as an alternative to the layer-wise training that was then the norm.

One interesting thing to note from the PDP handbook are mentions by LeCun and Hinton of what would later be called CNNs, which LeCun claims to have invented. It seems that Hinton deserves just as much credit as LeCun, and in any case these are discussed just as locally connected models using shared weights as an optimization.