Notes on the Connection Machine CM-1/CM-2:

As a product designer I try to find visual forms that express the emotional meaning an object has for its creators and its users. With the Connection Machine, at a time in the early 1980s when computers were popularly viewed as boring technical objects, I wanted to find a form that expressed the excitement and sense of adventure of artificial intelligence researchers in their search to create machines that think. Following are two articles that discuss this process from different viewpoints.

• On November 15, 2004, I gave a lecture at the MIT Stata Center on:
  "Finding Form for an Electronic Brain: the Connection Machines CM-1/CM-2"
  (Or: "How the Connection Machine Got Its Blinking Red Lights")
  The lecture was co-hosted by the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), where I was a research fellow in 2004, and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL.)
  
  
• "The Design of the Connection Machine," DesignIssues Journal, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring '94
  This is a longer illustrated article discussing the theory and history behind the visual design of the machine.
  
  
• "Machina Sapiens," Ylem Newsletter, vol.15: number 6
  This is a short article discussing some of the images, historical and fictional, that formed our perceptions of machine intelligence and the computer as "electronic brain."

• Hillis, W. Daniel. The Connection Machine, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA., 1985
  
  
• Hillis, W. Daniel. "The Connection Machine," Scientific American, Vol. 256, June 1987, pp. 108-115

• STS.185/6.972: The Structure of Engineering Revolutions
  
  
• Case Study: Thinking Machines Corporation

• "The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work," Basic Books, 1998
  
  

• Bronson, Po. "The Long Now," WIRED Magazine, May 1998, pp. 116-123, etc.