Dispersal
Many of the hardware people left for Sun Microsystems and went on to design the Sun Enterprise series of parallel computers. The Darwin datamining toolkit, developed by Thinking Machines' Business Supercomputer Group, was purchased by Oracle. Most of the team that built Darwin left for Dun & Bradstreet soon after the company entered bankruptcy.
Thinking Machines alumni ("thunkos") were instrumental in forming several parallel computing software start-ups, including Ab Initio Software and Applied Parallel Technologies. Ab Initio is still an independent company; Applied Parallel Technologies, later renamed to Torrent Systems, was acquired by Ascential Software, which was in turn acquired by IBM.
Besides Danny Hillis, other noted people who worked for or with the company included Greg Papadopoulos, David Waltz, Guy L Steele, Jr., Karl Sims, Brewster Kahle, Bradley Kuszmaul, Charles E. Leiserson, Marvin Minsky, Carl Feynman, Cliff Lasser, Marvin Denicoff, Alex Vasilevksy, Doug Lenat, Stephen Wolfram, Alan Edelman, Eric Lander, Richard Feynman, Richard Fishman, Mirza Mehdi, Alan Harshman, Richard Jordan, Alan Mercer, James Bailey, Tsutomu Shimomura and Jack Schwartz.
DARPA's Connection Machines were decommissioned by 1996.
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