MIT spin‑off Thinking Machines Corp. secured $5 M from CBS founder William Paley and sold Connection Machines to Lockheed, Chevron, and US government

academic panel at MIT missed the point: “(That is why it is called the Connection Machine.)”189 Hillis’s ambition to build this device boiled in him while he was at MIT, and it finally outstripped what MIT could support, so he gathered a group of students and started a small company. The Thinking Machines Corporation, blessed by some combination of Hillis’s charisma and the fantastic promise of the project, became a magnetic field for talent, ideas and money. In the early days of the firm, for instance, the hunt for investors led Danny to the luxurious New York City apartment of William Paley, the founder of CBS. Hillis lived then in a ramshackle house close to campus at MIT. He drove a surplus fire truck to work most days.1%° Faced with the urbane, powerful 81- year old founder of the largest radio and TV network in America, Danny jumped right into a passionate introduction of his ideas about connection and networks. Paley, cooly: "I didn't understand a word you said." Then: A check for $5 million. Or there was the time that Hillis asked Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman to tip him off about any smart scientists Thinking Machines might hire. Feynman, pushing 60, volunteered himself and spent his summer vacations for the next ten years with Hillis and his team.1?! When it came time to test the first Connection Machine, it was Feynman’s data that revealed how well the black box was doing its job. The architecture they had designed cranked through what would have been a month’s worth of complex chromodynamics problems in hours. As the machine got better, these already fast processing times improved by another factor of 1,000. Such a machine, for scientists who were desperate for computed answers, was like adding years to their life. If they could solve a problem in a week instead of years? The whole texture of their careers would be altered. “At times,” one fellow computer developer remarked, “the Connection Machine seems so different from current computers that it seems more akin to science fiction than high technology.”!92 Thinking Machines Corporation sold Danny’s computers to Lockheed to model stealth fighters. Chevron used one to model oil fields. The US government bought several to help to predict the weather. Puzzles long resistant to mere power melted in the face of parallel consideration. Nothing was more exciting about Hillis’s machines than this intimiate, unprecedented link between intelligence and speed. If you have twice as many processors as | do, you can perhaps crack a puzzle of genomics or cryptography a year faster. But say you have figured out how to have 275,000 machines linked together and I have 1,000? You can solve a 189 Adding: Hillis thesis, p. 19 190 He drove: Po Bronson, “The Long Now: Time Traveling with Danny Hillis”, Wired (May, 1998) 191 Feynman: W. Daniel Hillis, “Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine” Physics Today February 1989, p. 78 192 “At times”: Michael J. Black “Book Reviews: The Connection Machine”, Al Magazine Volume 7 Number 3 (1986) p 169 134 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018366