If there was ever a time that Thinking Machines could, and needed to, put itself on a solid financial and competitive foundation by merging with a deep-pocketed company or by going public, it was now. But Handler nixed all deal making. She felt the company could get a wildly successful teraflop machine out on its own.
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As the company forged ahead with its frantic effort to bring the new machine out on time, the corporate culture started to shift from openness to paranoia. Employees weren't allowed to discuss the machine with one another in the cafeteria. Customers were kept in the dark. The new machine was dubbed the CM-5, to foil hackers acting as corporate spies who presumably would be rummaging through the company's files looking for a nonexistent CM-3.
Thinking Machines announced the CM-5 in October 1991. Hillis claimed it had the highest "theoretical" peak performance of any supercomputer ever, if you added enough processors to it. The reality: at the time completion of the CM-5 was announced, the machine was slower than its predecessor, the CM-2. Among other problems, the standard chips the company had chosen weren't ready, so some machines had to ship with slower, earlier-generation chips. Meanwhile, competitors like Intel, Kendall Square Research (KSR), MasPar Computer, and nCube were starting to ship faster supercomputers. More than ever, Thinking Machines was depending on its DARPA edge to move its products.
Then, in August 1991, as DARPA was about to start the process of determining which supercomputer vendors would win the lion's share of its planned spending spree, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that the agency had been playing favorites. It turned out that DARPA had subsidized -- sometimes to the tune of the entire purchase price -- the sale of some 24 Connection Machines in recent years. The subsidies added up to a gift to Thinking Machines of $55 million -- 20% of the company's lifetime revenues to that point.
DARPA had greased Intel's supercomputing wheels too but had left the rest of the supercomputer industry to fend for itself. And now the other players were howling. Perhaps the clearest and most damning criticism came from KSR founder Henry Burkhardt: "Vendors handed money by the government have no interest in solving customers' problems," he growled.
An embarrassed Bush administration put an end to Thinking Machines' DARPA gravy train. For the first time the company had to sell its machines on their merits in an open market. At the end of 1992, Thinking Machines reported a loss for the year of $17 million. The CM-5 wasn't selling, and the company was hemorrhaging money. Hillis was no longer spending much time in the office. The first round of layoffs had started. Salaries were frozen. Requests for new laptop computers were being denied.
Meanwhile, Handler had an enormous marble archway installed in the atrium of the Carter Ink Building. When a national supercomputer conference was held in Seattle, she decided to stay in San Francisco and commute to Seattle from the swank Stanford Court Hotel. She commissioned a $40,000 logo design for a CM-5 sweatshirt and then rejected it. While the company was sinking, she focused her attention on putting out a cookbook with recipes from the company's now-infamous cafeteria. Increasingly paranoid, she had a video camera aimed at her personal parking spot and, by some accounts, made people take meetings with her in her parked car. She hired a bodyguard, telling her colleagues that she had received death threats.
Some members of Thinking Machines' board suddenly seemed to realize that the person who had been running the company all those years had no business skills. The board discussed dumping Handler, but she managed to get her biggest enemies there kicked off.
In early 1993 a new president was brought in, but Handler, who remained CEO, quickly got rid of him. Later in the year a lawyer named Richard Fishman was hired as president. Fishman was a longtime friend of Handler, but when he realized that no outsider would fund the sinking company while Handler remained at its helm, he engineered her ouster.
Fishman focused the company on the business market and began looking for a partner. Sun and IBM were interested, says Tucker, but weren't willing to take on Thinking Machines' mounting debt, which included six more years of rent at the Carter Ink Building, a $36-million commitment.
In mid-August, Thinking Machines filed for bankruptcy protection, and Fishman resigned. Soon Hillis himself left the company that had been founded around his thesis. Thinking Machines would reemerge as a small software firm selling programs for its former competitors' parallel computers.
As late as 1989, says Fishman, Thinking Machines was still three years ahead of the rest of the world in parallel-processing technology. "While others caught up," he says, "Thinking Machines was losing time, losing customers, and not moving on to the next generation." Had the CM-5 been built without the miscues and the wasted time, the company might have gone on to live up to its considerable promise. But, as one of the company's senior scientists would later put it, what if pigs could fly?
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Gary Taubes is a New York-based science and technology writer. His most recent book is Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion
