Thinking Machines Corporation was a
supercomputer manufacturer and
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...
(AI) company, founded in
Waltham, Massachusetts
Waltham ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, and was an early center for the labor movement as well as a major contributor to the American Industrial Revolution. The original home of the Boston Manufacturing Company, ...
, in 1983 by
Sheryl Handler and
W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
(MIT) on massively
parallel computing architectures into a commercial product named the
Connection Machine
A Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers that grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at Massachusetts Institute of Techno ...
. The company moved in 1984 from Waltham to
Kendall Square
Kendall Square is a neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The square itself at the intersection of Main Street and Broadway. It also refers to the broad business district east of Portland Street, northwest of the Charles River, north of MIT ...
in
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...
, 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.
Supercomputer products
On the hardware side, Thinking Machines produced several
Connection Machine
A Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers that grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at Massachusetts Institute of Techno ...
models (in chronological order): the CM-1, CM-2, CM-200, CM-5, and CM-5E. The CM-1 and 2 came first in models with 64K (65,536) bit-serial processors (16 processors per chip) and later, the smaller 16K and 4K configurations. The Connection Machine was programmed in a variety of specialized
programming language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language.
The description of a programming ...
s, including
*Lisp and CM Lisp (derived from
Common Lisp),
C* (derived by Thinking Machines from
C), and CM
Fortran. These languages used
proprietary compiler
In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs tha ...
s to translate code into the parallel
instruction set of the Connection Machine. The CM-1 through CM-200 were examples of ''single instruction, multiple data'' (
SIMD
Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD can be internal (part of the hardware design) and it can be directly accessible through an instruction set architecture (ISA), but it shoul ...
) architecture, while the later CM-5 and CM-5E were ''multiple instruction, multiple data'' (
MIMD) that combined commodity
SPARC
SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system develope ...
processors and proprietary vector processors in a ''
fat tree''
computer network
A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...
.
All Connection Machine models required a serial front-end processor, which was most often a
Sun Microsystems workstation, but on early models could also be a
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president un ...
(DEC)
VAX
VAX (an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The V ...
minicomputer or
Symbolics Lisp machine
Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, they ...
.
Thinking Machines also introduced an early commercial ''redundant array of independent disks'' (
RAID
Raid, RAID or Raids may refer to:
Attack
* Raid (military), a sudden attack behind the enemy's lines without the intention of holding ground
* Corporate raid, a type of hostile takeover in business
* Panty raid, a prankish raid by male college ...
) 2 disk array, the
DataVault, circa 1988.
Business history
In May 1985, Thinking Machines became the third company to
register
Register or registration may refer to:
Arts entertainment, and media Music
* Register (music), the relative "height" or range of a note, melody, part, instrument, etc.
* ''Register'', a 2017 album by Travis Miller
* Registration (organ), th ...
a
.com
The domain name .com is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. Added at the beginning of 1985, its name is derived from the word ''commercial'', indicating its original intended purpose for domains registere ...
domain name
A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...
(think.com). It became profitable in 1989, in part because of its contracts from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
). The next year, they sold $65 million (USD) worth of hardware and software, making them the market leader in parallel supercomputers. Thinking Machines' primary supercomputer competitor was
Cray Research
Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed ...
. Other
parallel computing competitors included
nCUBE
nCUBE was a series of parallel computing computers from the company of the same name. Early generations of the hardware used a custom microprocessor. With its final generations of servers, nCUBE no longer designed custom microprocessors for mach ...
, nearby
Kendall Square Research
Kendall Square Research (KSR) was a supercomputer company headquartered originally in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986, near Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was co-founded by Steven Frank and Henry Burkhardt I ...
, and
MasPar
MasPar Computer Corporation was a minisupercomputer vendor that was founded in 1987 by Jeff Kalb. The company was based in Sunnyvale, California.
History
While Kalb was the vice-president of the division of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) t ...
, which made a computer similar to the CM-2, and
Meiko Scientific, whose CS-2 was similar to the CM-5. In 1991, DARPA and the
United States Department of Energy
The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United Stat ...
reduced their purchases amid criticism they were unfairly favoring Thinking Machines at the expense of
Cray,
nCUBE
nCUBE was a series of parallel computing computers from the company of the same name. Early generations of the hardware used a custom microprocessor. With its final generations of servers, nCUBE no longer designed custom microprocessors for mach ...
, and
MasPar
MasPar Computer Corporation was a minisupercomputer vendor that was founded in 1987 by Jeff Kalb. The company was based in Sunnyvale, California.
History
While Kalb was the vice-president of the division of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) t ...
. Tightening export laws also prevented the most powerful Connection Machines from being exported. By 1992, the company was losing money, and CEO
Sheryl Handler was forced out.
In August 1994, Thinking Machines filed for
Chapter 11
Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code (Title 11 of the United States Code) permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. Such reorganization, known as Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is available to every business, wheth ...
bankruptcy. The hardware portion of the company was purchased by
Sun Microsystems, and TMC re-emerged as a small software company specializing in parallel software tools for commodity clusters and
data mining software for its installed base and former competitors' parallel supercomputers. In December 1996, the parallel software development section was also acquired by
Sun Microsystems.
Thinking Machines continued as a pure data mining company until it was acquired in 1999 by
Oracle Corporation. Oracle later acquired Sun Microsystems, thus re-uniting much of Thinking Machines' intellectual property.
The program ''
wide area information server Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) is a client–server text searching system that uses the ANSI Standard Z39.50 Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications" (Z39.50:1988) to search index database ...
'' (WAIS), developed at Thinking Machines by
Brewster Kahle, would later be influential in starting the
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
and associated projects, including the
Rosetta Project
The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone to last from 2000 to 12,000 AD; it is run by the Long Now Foundation. Its goal is ...
as part of Danny Hillis'
Clock of the Long Now
The Clock of the Long Now, also called the 10,000-year clock, is a mechanical clock under construction that is designed to keep time for 10,000 years. It is being built by the Long Now Foundation. A two-meter prototype is on display at the Sci ...
.
Architect
Greg Papadopoulos
Gregory Michael Papadopoulos (born 1958) is an American engineer, computer scientist, executive, and venture capitalist.
He is the creator and lead proponent for Redshift, a theory on whether technology markets are over or under-served by Moore's ...
later became Sun Microsystems's
chief technology officer (CTO).
Dispersal
Many of the hardware people left for
Sun Microsystems and went on to design the
Sun Enterprise series of parallel computers. The ''Darwin''
data mining toolkit, developed by Thinking Machines' Business Supercomputer Group, was purchased by
Oracle. Most of the team that built ''Darwin'' had already left for
Dun & Bradstreet soon after Thinking Machines Corporation entered bankruptcy in 1994.
Thinking Machines alumni (known as "Thunkos") helped create several parallel computing software start-ups, including
Ab Initio Software; and Applied Parallel Technologies, which was later renamed
Torrent Systems and acquired by
Ascential Software, which was in turn acquired by
IBM.
Besides Hillis, other noted people who worked for or with the company included Robert Millstein,
Greg Papadopoulos
Gregory Michael Papadopoulos (born 1958) is an American engineer, computer scientist, executive, and venture capitalist.
He is the creator and lead proponent for Redshift, a theory on whether technology markets are over or under-served by Moore's ...
,
David Waltz
David Leigh Waltz (28 May 1943 – 22 March 2012) was a computer scientist who made significant contributions in several areas of artificial intelligence, including constraint satisfaction, case-based reasoning and the application of massive ...
,
Guy L. Steele Jr.
Guy Lewis Steele Jr. (; born October 2, 1954) is an American computer scientist who has played an important role in designing and documenting several computer programming languages and technical standards.
Biography
Steele was born in Missouri ...
,
Karl Sims,
Brewster Kahle, Bradley Kuszmaul,
Carl Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superflu ...
, Cliff Lasser, Marvin Denicoff, Alex Vasilevsky, Allan Torres
Richard Fishman Mirza Mehdi, Alan Harshman, Richard Jordan, Alan Mercer, James Bailey,
Tsutomu Shimomura
is a Japanese-born American physicist and computer security expert. He is known for helping the FBI track and arrest hacker Kevin Mitnick. ''Takedown'', his 1996 book on the subject with journalist John Markoff, was later adapted for the sc ...
. Among the early corporate fellows of Thinking Machines were
Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...
,
Douglas Lenat
Douglas Bruce Lenat (born 1950) is the CEO of Cycorp, Inc. of Austin, Texas, and has been a prominent researcher in artificial intelligence; he was awarded the biannual IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1976 for creating the machine learning p ...
,
Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram (; born 29 August 1959) is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Ma ...
,
Tomaso Poggio
Tomaso Armando Poggio (born 11 September 1947 in Genoa, Italy), is the Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a member of the MIT Computer Scien ...
,
Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfl ...
, and
Jack Schwartz, later joined by
Charles E. Leiserson
Charles Eric 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. ...
,
Alan Edelman
Alan Stuart Edelman (born June 1963) is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Principal Investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Ar ...
,
Eric Lander
Eric Steven Lander (born February 3, 1957) is an American mathematician and geneticist who served as the 11th director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to the President, serving on the presidential Cabinet. La ...
, and
Lennart Johnsson.
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
's Connection Machines were decommissioned by 1996.
References in popular culture
In the 1993 film ''
Jurassic Park'', Connection Machines (non-functioning dummies) are visible in the park's control room, programmer Dennis Nedry mentions "eight Connection Machines" and a video about dinosaur cloning mentions "Thinking Machines supercomputers".
In the 1996 film ''
Mission Impossible'',
Luther Stickell asks Franz Krieger for "Thinking Machine laptops" to help hack into the
CIA's
Langley supercomputer.
[See wikiquote:Mission: Impossible (film)]
Tom Clancy
Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. (April 12, 1947 – October 1, 2013) was an American novelist. He is best known for his technically detailed espionage and military-science storylines set during and after the Cold War. Seventeen of his novels have ...
's novel ''
Rainbow Six Rainbow Six may refer to:
* ''Rainbow Six'' (novel), a 1998 novel by Tom Clancy
*''Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six'', a video game franchise published by Ubisoft
** ''Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six'' (video game), a tactical shooter video game
*"Rainbow Six", a ...
'' speaks of the NSA's "star machine from a company gone bankrupt, the Super-Connector from Thinking Machines, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts" in the NSA's basement. In addition, in ''
The Bear and the Dragon'' says the National Security Agency could crack nearly any book or cipher with one of three custom
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...
s designed for a Thinking Machines supercomputer.
In the 2008 video game ''
Fallout 3
''Fallout 3'' is a 2008 action role-playing game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. The third major installment in the ''Fallout'' series, it is the first game to be developed by Bethesda after acquiring ...
'', it is mentioned that the pre-war firm that made the computer systems for Vaults is called Think Machine.
See also
*
FROSTBURG – CM-5 used by the
National Security Agency
The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collect ...
*
Goodyear MPP
The Goodyear Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) was a
massively parallel processing supercomputer built by Goodyear Aerospace
for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. It was designed to deliver enormous computational power at lower cost than oth ...
*
ICL Distributed Array Processor
The Distributed Array Processor (DAP) produced by
International Computers Limited (ICL) was the world's first commercial
massively parallel computer. The original paper study was
complete in 1972 and building of the prototype began in 1974.
The fir ...
*
MasPar
MasPar Computer Corporation was a minisupercomputer vendor that was founded in 1987 by Jeff Kalb. The company was based in Sunnyvale, California.
History
While Kalb was the vice-president of the division of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) t ...
*
Parsytec
*
SUPRENUM
References
External links
The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines ''Inc. Magazine'', September 1995
'Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine' by W. Daniel HillisThinking Machinesby Alex Papadimoulis in
The Daily WTF's "Tales from the Interview"
Thinking Machines To File for Bankruptcy John Markoff, The New York Times, August 16, 1994.
{{Authority control
1983 establishments in Massachusetts
1994 disestablishments in Massachusetts
American companies established in 1983
American companies disestablished in 1994
Companies based in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Computer companies established in 1983
Computer companies disestablished in 1994
Defunct computer companies based in Massachusetts
Defunct computer companies of the United States
Defunct computer hardware companies
Defunct software companies of the United States
Lisp (programming language) software companies
Massively parallel computers
Oracle acquisitions
Parallel computing
SIMD computing
Software companies established in 1983
Software companies disestablished in 1994
Supercomputers
Technology companies established in 1983
Technology companies disestablished in 1994