1986's Computer

Connection Machine

Daniel Hillis of Thinking Machines Corp. moved artificial intelligence a step forward when he developed the controversial concept of massive parallelism in the Connection Machine. The machine used 16,000 processors and could complete several billion operations per second. Each processor had its own small memory linked with others through a flexible network that users could alter by reprogramming rather than rewiring.

The machine´s system of connections and switches let processors broadcast information and requests for help to other processors in a simulation of brain like associative recall. Using this system, the machine could work faster than any other at the time on a problem that could be parceled out among the many processors.