Thinking Machines Corporation
Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product named the Connection Machine. The company moved in 1984 from Waltham to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, close to the MIT AI Lab. Thinking Machines made some of the most powerful supercomputers of the time, and by 1993 the four fastest computers in the world were Connection Machines. The firm filed for bankruptcy in 1994; its hardware and parallel computing software divisions were acquired in time by Sun Microsystems.
Thinking Machines CM-1 at Computer History Museum. See also a detailed photo.
Thinking Machines CM-2 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. One of the face plates is partly removed to show the circuit boards inside.
Thinking Machines CM-5 FROSTBURG at the National Cryptologic Museum.
Thinking Machines CM-200 at the Bolo Computer Museum at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne.
William Daniel Hillis is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, who pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence. He founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a parallel supercomputer manufacturer, and subsequently was Vice President of Research and Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering.
Hillis in 2022
