Thinking Machines
More info
- Creator
- Danny Hillis, Sheryl Handler
- Released
- 1983–1994
- Type
- Supercomputer manufacturer
The company behind the Connection Machine, which bet on tens of thousands of simple processors instead of one fast one, and gave the supercomputer blinking red lights.
Danny Hillis's doctoral work at MIT became a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1983. The Connection Machine CM-1 (1985) had 65,536 one-bit processors executing the same instruction in lockstep, SIMD taken to an extreme, programmed in parallel dialects such as *Lisp and C*. The black cube with its panels of lights was as much industrial design as engineering.
The CM-5 (1991) switched to off-the-shelf SPARC processors and had a cameo in Jurassic Park. Most customers were US defence labs, and when Cold War funding dried up the company went bankrupt in 1994. Brewster Kahle was on the staff and built WAIS there before going on to found the Internet Archive.