Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company,[1] founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product named the Connection Machine.

In 1991, DARPA and the United States Department of Energy reduced their purchases amid criticism they were unfairly favoring Thinking Machines at the expense of Cray, nCUBE, and MasPar.

Besides Hillis, other noted people who worked for or with the company included Robert Millstein, Greg Papadopoulos, David Waltz, Guy L. Steele Jr., Karl Sims, Brewster Kahle, Bradley Kuszmaul, Carl Feynman, Cliff Lasser, Marvin Denicoff, Alex Vasilevsky, Allan Torres, Richard Fishman, Mirza Mehdi, Alan Harshman, Richard Jordan, Alan Mercer, James Bailey, Tsutomu Shimomura.

Among the early corporate fellows of Thinking Machines were Marvin Minsky, Douglas Lenat, Stephen Wolfram, Tomaso Poggio, Richard Feynman, and Jack Schwartz, later joined by Charles E. Leiserson, Alan Edelman, Eric Lander, and Lennart Johnsson.

In the 1996 film Mission Impossible, Luther Stickell asks Franz Krieger for "Thinking Machine laptops" to help hack into the CIA's Langley supercomputer.

In addition, in The Bear and the Dragon says the National Security Agency could crack nearly any book or cipher with one of three custom operating systems designed for a Thinking Machines supercomputer.

In the 2008 video game Fallout 3, it is mentioned that the pre-war firm that made the computer systems for Vaults is called Think Machine.