Business History
Thinking Machines was the third company to register a .com domain name (think.com), which it did in May 1985. It became profitable in 1989 thanks to its DARPA contracts, and in 1990 the company had $65 million (USD) in revenue, making it the market leader in parallel supercomputers. In 1991, DARPA reduced its purchases amid criticism it was unfairly subsidizing Thinking Machines at the expense of other vendors like Cray, IBM, and in particular, NCUBE and MasPar. By 1992 the company was losing money again, due to lack of business; CEO Sheryl Handler was forced out in the face of public criticism.
Thinking Machines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 1994. The hardware portion of the company was purchased by Sun Microsystems, and TMC re-emerged as a small software company specializing in parallel software tools for commodity clusters and data mining software for its installed base and former competitors' parallel supercomputers. In December 1996, the parallel software development business was acquired by Sun Microsystems, forming the basis of Sun's entry into High Performance Computing.
Thinking Machines continued as a pure data mining company until it was acquired in 1999 by Oracle Corporation. Oracle later acquired Sun Microsystems, thus re-uniting much of Thinking Machines' intellectual property.
The program WAIS, developed at Thinking Machines by Brewster Kahle, would later be influential in starting the Internet Archive and associated projects including the Rosetta Disk as part of Danny Hillis' Clock of the Long Now.
Key architect Greg Papadopoulos later became Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s Chief Technology Officer.
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