Hillis, W. Daniel

1956–

Technology Innovator and Entrepreneur

W. Daniel Hillis, an inventor, scientist, engineer, consultant, visionary, and author—among other things—is known for his futuristic thinking, revolutionary designs, and wild imagination. Renowned for creating massive parallel supercomputers, Hillis aspires to change the way that people think about technology.

Hillis was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1956, and spent the majority of his youth living in a variety of developing countries; his father, a scientist, explored the occurrence of hepatitis among children throughout the world. As an undergraduate in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he developed computer hardware and software for children at MIT's Logo Laboratory, as well as toys and games for the Milton Bradley Co. Before receiving his bachelor of science degree in 1978, Hillis co-founded Terrapin, Incorporated, where he designed computer software for elementary-school students. By 1981, Hillis received a masters of science in robotics at MIT while studying artificial intelligence. There, he was credited with producing tendon-controlled robotic arms, and built a tic-tac-toe computer from fishing line and 10,000 Tinkertoy parts. (The tic-tac-toe computer can currently be viewed at the Boston Computer Museum.)

After receiving a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 1988, he developed and marketed a new technology known as the massive parallel supercomputer, which forever changed the standard of supercomputing—the process of calculating, computing, and processing vast amounts of information. Hillis co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to market the supercomputer; his dissertation, The Connection Machine, became a very successful book.

Hillis' Connection Machine was sold to such establishments as Harvard University, American Express, and NASA. The massive parallel-supercomputing power of the Connection Machine transformed the standard of supercomputing through a change in processing that utilizes Hillis' design concepts of parallelism. In contrast to sequential computing, where one computer processor attacks one computing objective quickly, parallel computing used anywhere from 32 to 64,000 computer processors simultaneously to accomplish many tasks at once. Sequential computer processing can be compared to one ant digging a tunnel quickly; parallel computing is 64,000 isolated ants digging many smaller tunnels, in synchronization, to form one big one very quickly.

By 1985, Hillis had created by far the fastest computer in the industry. The Connection Machine enabled visualization of simulated events—for example, the result of two galaxies colliding—that were inconceivable by other means. Upon leaving Thinking Machines in 1995, he formed a consulting company called DHSH. In 1996, Hillis left DHSH to work full-time for one of the company's clients—the Walt Disney Company.

While with Disney, Hillis became vice president of research and development, as well as fellow, and developed business strategies and new technologies. His efforts contributed to the design of theme-park rides, and to a full-sized robot dinosaur. As Hillis explained in an article that he wrote for Forbes magazine in 1997, his job entailed teaching Disney to utilize technology.

Thriving on his ability to imagine what the future will be like, Hillis contemplates the future many decades from now, rather than a few years from now. He believes that the problem with technology has been the way it hindered people, and that this phenomenon has been responsible for stunting thinking to a short-term standpoint. Wired magazine freelance writer Po Bronson described the meaning of a “Hillisesque” object: If something is “Hillisesque” it represents Hillis' goal of changing the way that one thinks about technology. For instance, why should one believe that a computer could function only on electricity when Hillis considers it possible to construct a computer that derives its power from water that runs through copper plumbing?

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