Danny Hillis at the office in an H-1 engine of a Saturn 1B rocket, the first engine stage for the Apollo 7. (Credit: Daniel Hennessey)

In 1982, when he was still a student at MIT, Danny Hillis cofounded Thinking Machines, one of the most famous failures in the history of computing. A hive of wayward and brilliant researchers, Thinking Machines tried to build the world's first artificial intelligence. But if the company did not succeed in "building a machine that will be proud of us" (its corporate motto), its Connection Machine demonstrated the practicality of parallel processing, the foundation of modern supercomputing. Today, Danny Hillis is cochair of Applied Minds, a design and invention company, and he is building the Clock of the Long Now, a mechanical timepiece meant to last 10,000 years.

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