Thinking Machines Corporation was a
supercomputer manufacturer founded in
Waltham, Massachusetts in the late 1980s by
Danny Hillis[?] and
Sheryl Handler[?] to turn Hillis's doctoral work at
MIT on
parallel computing architectures into a commercial product called the
Connection Machine. Models produced, in order, were the CM-1, CM-2, CM-200, CM-5, and CM-5E. The company moved in the early 1990s from Waltham to
Kendall Square[?] in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from the MIT
AI Lab[?] and competitor
Kendall Square Research.
Thinking Machines went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1995, following the collapse of the US supercomputer market. Some of the software was purchased by Oracle and sold as the Darwin toolkit for data mining.
Besides Danny Hillis, other noted people who worked for or with the company included David Waltz[?], Guy L Steele[?], Karl Sims[?], Marvin Minsky, Brewster Kahle, and Carl Feynman[?].