Newsgroups: comp.parallel
From: zippy@cs.brandeis.edu (Patrick Tufts)
Subject: Re: What caused TMC to file Chapter 11?
Organization: Brandeis University
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 1995 12:45:40 GMT
Message-ID: <3g1kpr$po0@news.cs.brandeis.edu>

gardner@pink-panther.cs.uiuc.edu (Mark K. Gardner) writes:
>I have been trying to understand the business and technical reasons why 
>Thinking Machines Corp filed Chapter 11.  So far my research has led to 
>articles in Business Week, Wall Street Journal, etc.  This gives me the 
>business perspective, but I have been unable to uncover the perspective 
>of practitioners in the field of parallel computing.

I have a few guesses:

1. the US government is not buying as many high-end machines as it
planned to in the 80s.  Big-budget physics and military research got
the axe.

2. the commercial market for the machines is around 1/3 of what the
vendors were expecting.

3. the startups (TMC, KSR) were betting that either the government
market or the business market would bloom before players with deeper
pockets (IBM, DEC, Intel, SGI) entered the game.  If you have deep
pockets, you can fight a war of attrition and wait for the smaller
companies to drop out.  

--Pat


