alt Hacker NewsIt was indeed a Thinking Machines CM-5 — Nedry actually mentioned them in his line about how Hammond wouldn't be able to find anyone "anybody who can network 8 connection machines".
An actual assembled CM-5 actually cost closer to a million dollars.
But, from what I remember the one in the control room is a shell. In the CM-1 and CM-2, the LEDs were actual status indicators on the processors, which Tamiko Theil and the other designers had the engineers move to be at the edge of the boards, so that they'd shine through the case. Super cool.
But by the CM-5, they were run off a simple microcontroller.
They went bust not long after this movie.
I made a YouTube video on the history of the Connection Machine – it was a lot of work, and if you're interested in this sort of thing I think you'll enjoy it:
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Great video. I visited Brewster Kahle at Thinking Machines back when I was in college and that visit ended up being one of the major influences in my career. The CM was way ahead of it's time.
Thinking Machines also pioneered WAIS which was a precursor to modern search engines.
Also, the indoor park "tour" voiceover refers to "Thinking Machine supercomputers", which I never figured were a brand name until today!
Thinking Machines: "We are building a machine that will be proud of us."
Do you think it's coincidence the chip for Skynet looks so much like the Connection Machine?
The funniest part about this thing is that it seems to have had roughly the same performance of a modern day CM5 (the Raspberry kind).
I had no idea Thinking Machine was a brand! I just thought they were "thinking machine super computers" another way of saying "artificial intelligence super computers" or "machine learning" (dunno if ML was around then :shrug:)