Company Profile THE RISE and Fall THE 01 BRILLIANT START-UP THAT Some day we will build a think­ I~Z~~~~~ Thinking ing machine. It will be a truly NEVER GRASPED intelligent machine. One that can see and hear and speak. A THE BASICS Mach-Ines machine that will be proud of us. by Gary Taubes -From a Thinking Machines brochure seven 'years a~ter. its The truth is very different. This is the simple proeessors, all of them completing In 19 90 founding, Thlllklllg story of how Thinking Machines got the a single instruction at the same time. To Machines was the market leader in paral­ jump on a hot new market-and then get more speed, more processors would lel supercomputers, with sales of about screwed up, big time. be added. Eventually, so the theory went, $65 million. Not only was the company with enough processors (perhaps billions) protitable; it also, in the words of one IBM ntil W. Daniel Hillis came along, and the right software, a massively paral­ computer scientist, had cornered the mar­ Ucomputers more or less had been de­ lel computer might start acting vaguely . ket "on sex appeal in high-performance signed along the lines of ENIAC. Ifl that human. Whether it would take pride in its computing." Several giants in the com­ machine a single processor complete? in­ creators would remain to be seen. puter industry were seeking a merger or a structions one at a time, in sequence. "Se­ Hillis is what good scientists call a very partnership with the company. Wall Street quential" computers are good at adding bright guy-creative, imaginative, but not was sniffing around for an initial public long strings of numbers and at other feats quite a genius. He is also an inveterate offering. Even Hollywood was interested. of arithmetic. But they're seriously deli­ tinkerer, whose work has always been Steven Spielberg was so taken with cient at the kinds of pattern-recognition more fascinating than practical. On the Thinking Machines and its technology tasks that a two-week-old puppy can mas­ fifth floor of Boston's Computer Mu­ that he would soon cast the company's ter effortlessly-identifying faces or fig­ seum, for instance, is a minimalist com­ gleaming black Connection Machine in uring out where it is in a room. Puppies puter constructed of fishing line and the role of the supercomputer in the film can do that because their brains-like 10,000 Tinkertoy parts. Hillis built it to Jurassic Park, even though the Michael those of all animals, including humans­ play and win at tic-tac-toe, which it in­ Crichton novel to which the movie was are "massively parallcl" computers. In­ variably does. His other work includes a otherwise faithful specified a Cray. stead of looking at information one jig­ robot finger that can differentiate between In August of last year Thinking Ma­ saw-puzzle piece at a time, a brain a washer and a screw but is flummoxed chines filed for Chapter 11. It had gone processes millions, even billions, of by a piece of gum; a propeller-driven through three CEOs in two years and was pieces of data at once, allowing images jumpsuit that allows its wearer literally to losing money at a considerably faster rate and other patterns to leap out. walk on water; and a home robot con­ than it had ever made it. While a graduate student at MIT's Arti­ structed of paint cans, lightbulbs, and a What caused this high-flying company fIcial Intelligence (AI) Lab, Hillis, whom rotisserie motor. to come crashing to earth? The standard everyone knows as Danny, had conceived At the AI Lab, Hillis had become a explanation is that Thinking Machines of a computer architecture for his thesis disciple of legendary AI guru Marvin was a great company victimized by the that would mimic that massively parallel Minsky. The two were determined to sudden cutbacks in science funding process in silicon. Hillis called the device build a connection machine as a tool with brought about by the end of the cold war. a "connection machine": it had 64,000 which to develop software programs for 1995, No.3 Inc. Tcchnology 61 artificial intelligence. Because the cost others eventually agreed to kick in a total he quit. Emotional decision making would be prohibitive for a university lab­ of $16 mi Ilion to the venture. would last almost until the company fell. oratory, they decided to form a company. In May 1983, despite the lack of a busi­ They went looking for help and found ness plan, the company was founded and n the first few years it didn't seem to Sheryl Handler. took up shop in a dilapidated mansion I matter. Thinking Machines didn't need Handler had participated in the start-up outside Boston that once was owned by to make good business decisions because of the Genetics Institute, a Harvard-based Thomas Paine, the author of the Revolu­ it had the Defense Advanced Research genetic-engineering firm. Her back­ tionary War pamphlet Common Sense. Projects Agency. A research arm of the ground was eclectie: she haa studied inte- Hillis and Handler called their new Defense Department, DARPA was looking company Thinking for computer architectures that would en­ Machines because, able tanks, missiles, and other weapons to says Hillis, "we recognize enemy targets and understand wanted a dream spoken orders. In 1984 Hillis and his col­ we weren't going leagues at Thinking Machines repackaged to outgrow." As it Hillis's thesis and pitched it to DARPA. turned out, there The agency responded by offering the was never much company a multiyear $4.5-million con­ danger of that. tract. Now all Thinking Machines had to The new com- do was build one of the world's fastest pany's managers computers in two years' time. immediately got The company promptly went on a hir­ into a disagree­ ing binge. lts prime hunting grounds were ment over the mar­ the computer-science departments of MIT, Brain man: Danny Hillis wanted to build machines that could ket for supercom­ Carnegie-Mellon, Yale, and Stanford­ achieve emotions-not machines that would solve companies' puters. Hillis and which happened to house four of the problems. Handler (Minsky world's leading AI labs. Everyone, from quickly became a programmers to administrative assistants, rior design, held a master's degree in figurehead at the company) wanted to de­ had to be interviewed by Handler, who landscape architecture from Harvard, and sign a machine strictly along the lines of had a very specific, if mysterious, idea of at the time was pursuing a doctorate in Hillis's thesis, a machine that would have who would be good enough to work for city planning at MIT. She was also run­ its maximum impact as a research tool for Thinking Machines. (Many researchers ning her own nonprofit consulting firm, scientists studying artificial intelligence. later reported that once they were hired, specializing in third-world resource plan­ (Hillis envisioned his machine eventually they never got to speak to Handler ning. She had a taste for classical music becoming a sort of public-intelligence again-even when they were alone with and a fine appreciation for style. She'd utility into which people would tap their her in an elevator.) even been the subject of a Dewars Profile home pes, thereby bringing artificial in­ In fact, Thinking Machines was be­ that ran with the quote "My feminine in­ telligence to the world.) Howard Res­ coming Handler's aesthetic creation as stinct to shelter and nurture contributes to nikov, a research director recruited by much as the Connection Machine was my professional perspective." Minsky, on the other hand, argued for a Hillis's. In the summer of 1984 the com­ Handler also had a talent for cultivat­ more f1exible architecture that could sup­ pany moved into its new home-the top ing friendships with brilliant and famous port whatever style of computing was two nOOfS of the old Carter Ink Building people. One of her Genetics Institute col­ needed to solve real-world problems. Af­ in Cambridge, Mass., a few blocks from leagues later called her a "professional ter all, the more problems the machine MIT. Handler personally oversaw the de­ schmoozer." She quickly proved her use­ could solve, the more sales prospects sign of the office space, insisting that each fulness by connecting the people who there would be. office be painted a different and. specific would build the Connection Machine For a year, while the argument went on, color. Huge open spaces were created to with CBS founder William Paley. Hillis, the company did nothing. Finally, Han­ stimulate idea sharing and creativity. A t-.linsky. and Handler pitched the idea to dIer and Hillis won out. "We had all sorts plush cafeteria was put in, complete with "aley and CBS president Fred Stanton in a of reasoned discussions," says Resnikov. a gourmet chef. Couches were scattered meeting. to which Hillis wore his custom­ "and then emotional decisions were fun­ throughout the offices so that researchers ary jC4II1\ illll! T-shiI1. Still, he managed to damentally made by Sheryl and Danny." could take naps or even sleep there imprcs, the tdcvisioll moguls, who with Resnikov lasted another two years before overnight, which many of them did. And 62 Inc. Tcchnology 1995. NO.3 the soft-drink machine was wired to a ter­ weight outside AI research. Unfortu­ predicting earthquakes, revealing the nu­ minal. Researchers who wanted a drink nately, according to Resnikov, the deci­ ances of quantum mechanics.