When Danny Hillis first appeared on the computer scene in the mid-1980s, it was easy to dismiss him -- and the odd-looking device he called the Connection Machine -- as part of the industry's lunatic fringe. The chipmunk-faced scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had achieved a certain local notoriety from tooling around the streets of Cambridge in a secondhand fire engine. As an undergraduate he invented a mechanical computer, made entirely out of Tinkertoys, that could play tick-tack-toe. And as a graduate student at MIT's famed Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, he spent much of his time worrying about things like...
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