The Connection Machine series grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternates to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation. The CM-1, developed at MIT, was a "massively parallel" hypercube arrangement of thousands of very simple processors, each with their own RAM.
Hillis and Sheryl Handler founded Thinking Machines in Waltham, Mass and assembled a team to develop the CM-2, which depending on the configuration had as many as 64k processors. A later modification added numeric co-processors to the system, with some fixed number of the original simple processors sharing each numeric processor.
After the CM-2, Thinking Machines switched from a hypercube architecture of simple processors to a fat tree network of RISC processors (Sun SPARCs).\
Thinking Machines went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1995, following the collapse of the US supercomputer market. Some of the software was purchased by Oracle and sold as the Darwin toolkit for data mining.
Besides Danny Hillis, other noted people who worked for or with the company included David Waltz, Guy L Steele, Karl Sims, Marvin Minsky, Brewster Kahle, and Carl Feynman.