Thinking Machines Corporation was a

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

manufacturer and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

(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 Technological and industrial history of the United States, American Industrial Revoluti ...

, in 1983 by

Sheryl Handler Sheryl Handler (born 1955) is an American businesswoman recognized as one of the founders of Thinking Machines. She is the founder and CEO of Ab Initio. Education and career Handler attended Case Western Reserve University for interior design and ...

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 university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT) on massively

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computing, computation in which many calculations or Process (computing), processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. ...

architectures into a commercial product named the

Connection Machine The Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers sold by Thinking Machines Corporation. The idea for the Connection Machine grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann arch ...

. The company moved in 1984 from Waltham to

Kendall Square Kendall Square is a neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The square itself is at the intersection of the Main Street and Broadway. It also refers to the broad business district east of Portland Street, northwest of the Charl ...

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, ...

, close to the

MIT AI Lab Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence 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 Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the deb ...

in 1994; its hardware and parallel computing software divisions were acquired in time by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

Supercomputer products

On the hardware side, Thinking Machines produced several

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 In computer architecture, bit-serial architectures send data one bit at a time, along a single wire, in contrast to bit-parallel word architectures, in which data values are sent all bits or a word at once along a group of wires. All digita ...

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. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

s, including *Lisp and CM Lisp (derived from

Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S2018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperli ...

), C* (derived by Thinking Machines from C), and CM Fortran. These languages used

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