THE CONNECTION MACHINE
Thinking Machine - CM2

CONTEMPORARY COMPUTERS

My largest items are two 16 kiloprocessor supercomputers. They are two Connection Machine 2s (CM2s) and one Datavault (pictured at left). Only about fifty were built by Thinking Machines Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Karl Sims' did much of his evolutionary art on this machine. It won high acclaim for its external design and internal architecture: a hypercube of eight smaller cubes representing the connectivity of its microprocessors. The black monolith was paved with red LEDs, each representing one CPU. The cube was otherwise featureless and nameless, giving the impression of awesome computing power. Everyone in the know knew what it was. The CM-2 is reminiscent of the "Womper" in the movie War Games. The successor to the CM-2 is seen in the movie Jurassic Park. In the movie the CM-5 and Thinking Machines Corporation received repeated plugs. Although the dinosaurs were fake, the computer was quite real.