Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1982 by W. Daniel Hillis and Sheryl Handler to turn Hillis's doctoral work at MIT on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product called the Connection Machine. The company moved in 1984 from Waltham to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, close to the MIT AI Lab and Thinking Machine's competitor Kendall Square Research. Besides Kendall Square Research, Thinking Machines' competitors included MasPar, which made a computer similar to the CM-2, and Meiko, whose later offerings were similar to the CM-5. A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. ... Waltham is a city located in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a research and educational institution located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT is a world leader in science and technology, as well as in many other fields, including management, economics, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. ... Parallel computing is the simultaneous execution of the same task (split up and specially adapted) on multiple processors in order to obtain results faster. ... The Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hilliss research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation. ... 1984 (MCMLXXXIV) is a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Kendall Square is a neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, located around the intersection of Main Street, Broadway, Wadsworth Street, and Third Street. ... Cambridge City Hall Cambridge is a city in the Greater Boston area of Massachusetts, United States. ... ... Kendall Square Research (KSR) was a supercomputer company headquartered originally in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986, near MIT. It was co-founded by Henry Burkhardt III who had previously helped found Data General and Encore Computer and was one of the original team that designed the PDP-8... MasPar Computer Corporation was a minisupercomputer vendor that was founded in 1987 by Jeff Kalb. ... The Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hilliss research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation. ... Meiko Scientific was a supercomputer company founded by members of the design team working on the INMOS Transputer. ... The Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hilliss research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation. ...

Products

Thinking Machines produced a number of Connection Machine models (in chronological order): the CM-1, CM-2, CM-200, CM-5, and the CM-5E. The Connection Machine was programmed in a variety of specialized languages, including *Lisp and CM Lisp (derived from Common Lisp), C* (derived from C), and FORTRAN (using a special compiler to translate standard Fortran code to the parallel instruction set of the machine). The CM-1 through CM-200 were examples of SIMD architecture (Single Instruction Multiple Data), while the CM-5 and CM-5E were MIMD (Multiple Instructions Multiple Data). Thinking Machines also introduced the first commercial RAID disk array, called the DataVault, in 1985. See Star Lisp ... Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, standardised by ANSI X3. ... The designation C: (sometimes C: ) is the drive letter that refers to the main partition (or portion of an hard drive) on an MS-DOS or Windows personal computer. ... C# redirects here. ... Fortran (also FORTRAN) is a computer programming language originally developed in the 1950s; it is still used for scientific computing and numerical computation half a century later. ... -1... Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD) is a type of parallel computing architecture where many functional units perform different operations on different data. ... In computing, a redundant array of independent disks, also known as redundant array of inexpensive disks (commonly abbreviated RAID) is a system of using multiple hard drives for sharing or replicating data among the drives. ...

Business history

Thinking Machines became profitable in 1989 thanks to its DARPA contracts, and in 1990 the company had $65 million (USD) in revenue, making it the market leader in parallel supercomputers. In 1991, DARPA reduced its purchases amid criticism it was unfairly subsidizing Thinking Machines at the expense of other vendors like Cray and IBM. By 1992 the company was losing money again, due to lack of business; CEO Sheryl Handler was forced out in the face of public criticism. 1989 (MCMLXXXIX) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. ... This article is about the year. ... 1991 (MCMXCI) is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... For alternate meanings, see Cray (disambiguation). ... International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, or colloquially, Big Blue) NYSE: IBM (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since 1888) is headquartered in Armonk, NY, USA. The company manufactures and sells computer hardware, software, infrastructure services and consulting services. ... 1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday. ...

Thinking Machines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 1994. The hardware portion of the company was purchased by Sun Microsystems, and it then re-emerged as a small software company writing applications for its installed base and former competitors' parallel supercomputers. Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code governs the process of reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. ... 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International year of the Family. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...

Dispersal

Many of the hardware people left for Sun Microsystems and went on to design the Sun Enterprise series of parallel computers. The Darwin datamining toolkit, developed by Thinking Machines' Business Supercomputer Group, was purchased by Oracle. Most of the team that built Darwin left for Dun & Bradstreet soon after the company entered bankruptcy. Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... The Sun Enterprise is a series of servers by Sun Microsystems that already is or is fast nearing obsolescence. ... Oracle Corporation NASDAQ: ORCL, one of the major companies developing database management systems, tools for database development, and enterprise resource planning software, customer relationship management software (CRM) and supply chain planning (SCM) software dates from 1977 and has offices in more than 145 countries around the world. ... The Dun & Bradstreet Corp (NYSE: DNB), headquartered in Short Hills, New Jersey, USA, is among the leading providers of business information on business. ...

Besides Danny Hillis, other noted people who worked for or with the company included Greg Papadopoulos, David Waltz, Guy L Steele, Jr., Karl Sims, Brewster Kahle, Bradley Kuszmaul, Charles E. Leiserson, Marvin Minsky, Carl Feynman, Cliff Lasser, Alex Vasilevsky, Doug Lenat, Stephen Wolfram, Eric Lander, Richard Feynman, Mirza Mehdi, and Jack Schwartz. Greg Papadopoulos is the current Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer | CTO of Sun Microsystems. ... Guy Lewis Steele, Jr. ... Karl Sims is a researcher formerly with the MIT Media Lab who is most well known for using genetic programming to evolve virtual creatures that competed in various simulated environments as described in this paper. ... Brewster Kahle speaking 20 November 2002 Brewster Kahle (last name pronounced kale, like the vegetable) was an early member of the Thinking Machines team and later went on to found WAIS (sold to AOL) and later Alexa Internet (sold to Amazon. ... Charles Leiserson is a computer scientist, specializing in the theory of parallel computing and distributed computing, and particularly practical applications thereof; as part of this effort, he developed the Cilk multithreaded language. ... Marvin Lee Minsky (born August 9, 1927), sometimes affectionately known as Old Man Minsky, is an American scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of MITs AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy. ... Carl Feynman is the son of Richard Feynman. ... Douglas B. Lenat is the CEO of Cycorp, Inc. ... Stephen Wolfram (born August 29, 1959 in London, England) is a scientist known for his work in cellular automata and computer algebra, and is the creator of the computer program Mathematica. ... Eric S. Lander (b. ... Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) (surname pronounced FINE-man; in IPA) was one of the most influential American physicists of the 20th century, expanding greatly the theory of quantum electrodynamics. ... Jacob T. Schwartz (Jack) is a mathematician, computer scientist, and professor of computer science at the NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. ...

DARPA's Connection Machines were decomissioned by 1996. [1] The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. ... 1996 (MCMXCVI) is a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ...

External links

• The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines, Inc. Magazine, September 1995
• 'Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine' by W. Daniel Hillis

1995 (MCMXCV) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

See also

• FROSTBURG — a CM-5 used by the NSA