Skip to content
◈ALB Atlas

Thinking Machines Corporation Dead

Thinking Machines Corporation
KindCompany
Founded1983
Defunct1994
StatusDead
FoundersDanny Hillis & Sheryl Handler
FieldSupercomputers
Sourcebitsavers.org ↗

The Connection Machine company — massive parallelism, *Lisp, and the most beautiful computers ever built. Chapter 11 in 1994; its ideas became the standard.

Created Connection Machine CM-1

Hillis's MIT thesis — the Connection Machine, a 65,536-processor SIMD array — became the company he co-founded in 1983. The CM-1's blinking-LED cube (designed with Tamiko Thiel) won awards; the CM-2 reached 5.2 GFLOPS and held the 'fastest computer' title in 1992.

Programming it required *Lisp or C* — parallel dialects that never found a mainstream. Cold War funding cuts hit supercomputing; Thinking Machines filed Chapter 11 in August 1994. Data parallelism is now how all HPC works; the company that proved it isn't here.

Sources

  1. bitsavers.org/pdf/thinkingMachines/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation