Thinking Machines Corporation

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Thinking Machines CM-5 "FROSTBURG" at the National Cryptologic Museum

Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1982 by W. Daniel "Danny" 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 Machines' 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 CS-2 was similar to the CM-5. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1994, with its hardware and parallel computing software divisions eventually acquired by Sun Microsystems.

"We're building a machine that will be proud of us." – Thinking Machines' motto

Contents

Products [edit]

Advertisement poster located at the National Cryptologic Museum

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 CM-1 and 2 came first in models with 64K (65,536) bit-serial processors (16 processors per chip) and later smaller configurations(16,384 (16K) and 4,096 (4K) processors). 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 CM FORTRAN. These languages used proprietary compilers to translate code into the parallel instruction set of the Connection Machine. The CM-1 through CM-200 were examples of SIMD architecture (Single Instruction Multiple Data), while the later CM-5 and CM-5E were MIMD (Multiple Instructions Multiple Data) using commodity SPARC processors combined with proprietary vector processors in a "fat tree" network. Thinking Machines also introduced the first commercial RAID disk array, called the DataVault, in 1985[citation needed].

The CM-2 required a Symbolics 3600 LISP machine as a front-end processor; later models used a Sun Microsystems workstation or VAX minicomputer.

Thinking Machines developed the C* programming language as an extension of the C programming language for the Connection Machine data parallel computing system.

Business history [edit]

Thinking Machines was the third company to register a .com domain name (think.com), which it did in May 1985. It became profitable in 1989 thanks to its DARPA contracts,[citation needed] 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, IBM, and in particular, NCUBE and MasPar. 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.

Thinking Machines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 1994. 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 business was acquired by Sun Microsystems, forming the basis of Sun's entry into High Performance Computing.

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 WAIS, developed at Thinking Machines by Brewster Kahle, would later be influential in starting the Internet Archive and associated projects including the Rosetta Disk as part of Danny Hillis' Clock of the Long Now.

Key architect Greg Papadopoulos later became Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s Chief Technology Officer.

Dispersal [edit]

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.

Thinking Machines alumni ("thunkos") were instrumental in forming several parallel computing software start-ups, including Ab Initio Software and Applied Parallel Technologies. Ab Initio is still an independent company; Applied Parallel Technologies, later renamed to Torrent Systems, was acquired by Ascential Software, which was in turn acquired by IBM.

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, Carl Feynman, Cliff Lasser, Marvin Denicoff, Alex Vasilevksy, Richard Fishman, Mirza Mehdi, Alan Harshman, Richard Jordan, Alan Mercer, James Bailey, Tsutomu Shimomura. Among the early Corporate Fellows of Thinking Machines were Marvin Minsky, Doug Lenat, Stephen Wolfram, Tomaso Poggio, Richard Feynman, and Jack Schwartz later joined by Charles E. Leiserson, Alan Edelman and Eric Lander,Lennart Johnsson .

DARPA's Connection Machines were decommissioned by 1996.[1]

References in popular culture [edit]

In the 1993 film Jurassic Park, the character Dennis Nedry refers to networking "eight Connection Machines", indicating that the computers that run the fictional park are supplied by the Thinking Machines company.[2] The narrator actually mentions "Thinking Machines supercomputers" in a video that explains the process of cloning dinosaurs. Connection Machines (non-functioning dummies) are visible in the control-room of the park as well.

The 1996 film Mission Impossible has a reference to the company when Ving Rhames character Luther Stickell asks Jean Reno's character Franz Kreiger for Thinking Machine laptops to assist with a hack into the CIA's Langley supercomputer.[3]

Tom Clancy's novel The Bear and The Dragon mentions that the National Security Agency was able to crack nearly any book or cipher by using one of three custom operating systems designed for a Thinking Machines supercomputer.

See also [edit]

References [edit]

  1. ^ SCD supercomputers, past and present (grouped by vendor) CISL Supercomputer Gallery
  2. ^ Movie Quotes Database
  3. ^ See wikiquote:Mission: Impossible (film)

External links [edit]

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