Shear-sort opened new avenues in the research of sorting techniques for meshconnected processor arrays. The algorithm is extremely simple and converges to a snake-like sorted sequence with a time complexity which is suboptimal by a logarithmic factor. The techniques used for analyzing shear-sort have been used to derive more efficient algorithms, which have important ramifications both from practical and theoretical viewpoints. Although the algorithms described apply to any general two-dimensional computational model, the focus of most discussions is on meshconnected computers which are now commercially available. In spite of a rich history of 0(n) sorting algorithms on an n × n SIMD mesh, the constants associated with the leading term (i.e., n) are fairly large. This had led researchers to speculate about the tightness of the lower bound. The work in this paper sheds some more light on this problem as a 4n-step algorithm is shown to exist for a model slightly more powerful than the conventional SIMD model. Moreover, this algorithm has a running time of 3n steps on the more powerful MIMD model, which is “truly” optimal for such a model. © 1989 IEEE