designed a massively parallel computer with 64,000 processors. He named it the Connection Machine and founded what may have been the first Al company—Thinking Machines Corporation—to produce and market it. This was despite a lunch he had with Richard Feynman, at which the celebrated physicist remarked, “That is positively the d

designed a massively parallel computer with 64,000 processors. He named it the Connection Machine and founded what may have been the first Al company—Thinking Machines Corporation—to produce and market it. This was despite a lunch he had with Richard Feynman, at which the celebrated physicist remarked, “That is positively the d

engineer, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a company that developed the Connection Machine,

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 t