Paying the sorry price for being a pioneer too far ahead of its time, Cambridge, Massachsusetts-based massively parallel systems pioneer Thinking Machines Corp is to be broken off and sold off in bits as soon as its imminent filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from its creditors is in. The filing was made because business for the company suddenly dried up completely after word got out that the company was in serious difficulties. The firm’s president, Richard Fishman told Reuter he expected the company to be broken up and that bidders for pieces of the company will be forming an orderly queue within days. Sun Microsystems Inc and AT&T Corp are known to be interested in parts of the company – its current line of CM5 machines are Sparc-based, and software and compilers are likely to be of interest to Sun. Thinking Machines had also reportedly talked to IBM Corp, but IBM demanded that it switch to the PowerPC and grant a free licence to some of its software in return for a minority equity investment – and Thinking Machines felt it was asking too much for too little. Fishman said he has had talks with 20 firms to form strategic partnerships since he joined Thinking Machines 10 months ago. We got very close with a few of them. And unfortunately, it just fell apart in the last week or two, he said. He had hoped to raise $25m from existing investors and a further $25m from new investors. Fishman plans to resign immediately, and Richard Clayton, currently senior vice-president, will become acting president. The plan to file was accompanied by lay-off of about 140 of the 425 employees and more are to go soon. Thinking Machines said that while in Chapter 11 proceedings, it will aggressively market its technology through licences to other companies, and will maintain a small organisation to provide service and support for its 112 machines in use around the world. The assets for sale include a future parallel computer under development, its software development tools, and the Darwin data mining application that enables a massively parallel machine to search through enormous mounds of data to identify nuggets of underlying relationships. American Express Co uses Darwin and a Thinking Machines computer to mine credit-card data for new information about its customers. Thinking Machines lost $20m in 1993 on sales of $82m, and was last profitable in 1990, when it earned $1m on sales of $65m. One of the company’s problems was that it was locked into a long-term lease for its headquarters, obligating it to spend more than $40m in the next five years; it has not paid its rent for the last six months. Together with our customers, we have opened a new frontier in computing, said Danny Hillis, chief scientist and leading visionary at Thinking Machines. I am sad we have not been able to turn our technical successes into financial success, but I am proud of our team, our customers and what we have accomplished. Hillis told the New York Times that no matter what happened with Thinking Machines, he sticks to his original goal – building a machine that can think: I still want to make a thinking machine, he said. This is a setback, but building a fast computer was just a step toward that goal.
