Thinking Machines Corporation

Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 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 known as 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. Other 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; its hardware and parallel computing software divisions were eventually acquired by Sun Microsystems.