[3] Born September 25, 1956, in Baltimore, Maryland, Danny Hillis spent much of his childhood living overseas, in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

As an undergraduate, he worked at the MIT Logo Laboratory under the tutelage of Seymour Papert, developing computer hardware and software for children.

In 1981, he proposed building a massively parallel computer for Artificial Intelligence, consisting of a million processors, each similar to a modern Graphics Processing Unit.

He named it the Connection Machine, and it became the topic of his PhD, for which he received the 1985 Association for Computing Machinery Doctoral Dissertation award.

[12] Hillis earned his doctorate as a Hertz Foundation Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon and Gerald Sussman, receiving his PhD in 1988.

In addition to designing the company's major products, Hillis worked closely with users of his machine, applying it to problems in astrophysics, aircraft design, financial analysis, genetics, computer graphics, medical imaging, image understanding, neurobiology, materials science, cryptography, and subatomic physics.

At Thinking Machines, he built a team of scientists, designers, and engineers, including people in the field as well as those who later became leaders and innovators in multiple industries.

Among the users of Thinking Machines computers was Sergey Brin, who went on later to found Google,[23] and Neal Stephenson, who attempted to use a CM-2 to implement a game that he later turned into the novel Snow Crash.

[37] For Herman Miller, Hillis designed an audio privacy solution[buzzword][38][39] based on phonetic jumbling—Babble[40]—which was received in the media as a version of the Cone of Silence, and was marketed through a new company, Sonare.

In 2005, Hillis and others from Applied Minds founded Metaweb Technologies to develop a semantic data storage infrastructure[45] for the Internet, and Freebase, an open, structured database of the world's knowledge.

[49] Hillis and his colleagues at API developed one of the first protein biomarker discovery platforms and a blood test for early stage colon cancer, but they were unable to convince investors to finance taking their proteomic technology to the market.

Applied Invention co-founded Dark Sky,[54] a weather forecasting technology company with consumer web and mobile applications[55] that was eventually sold to Apple.