July 15, 2026
Physics, but make it messy
Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine
Feynman called it a dumb idea, then showed up for work—and commenters lost it
TLDR: Danny Hillis shared how Richard Feynman mocked his giant computer idea, then joined the project anyway and helped build computing history. Commenters turned it into a circus of Feynman fandom, Jurassic Park trivia, creepy AI-voice anxiety, and loud demands for news about a totally different clock.
This story should be about genius physicist Richard Feynman helping build an early supercomputer with Danny Hillis—but in the comments, it quickly turns into a full-on fan pile-on, nostalgia fest, and one very loud side quest about the clock. Hillis recalls pitching Feynman on a wild plan for a machine with a million tiny processors, only to get hit with the ultimate insult: it was "the dopiest idea" he’d ever heard. Naturally, that only made Feynman more interested. By the end of lunch, he’d signed on. Community reaction? A mix of awe, delight, and the usual internet chaos.
The warmest comments are basically people swooning over Feynman’s larger-than-life personality—showing up, saluting, demanding a “real” job, then getting sent to buy office supplies like the world’s most overqualified intern. Others latched onto the retro-tech glamour: one commenter gleefully pointed out that a Connection Machine appears in Jurassic Park, which instantly turned the thread into a nerd treasure hunt. Another was surprised to learn the project had DARPA funding, adding a little military-money intrigue to the legend.
But the funniest mini-drama came from people barely engaging with the article at all and instead pounding the table for updates on the clock we all donated money for, accusing the site of dodging the real issue. And then there’s the eerie modern twist: one fan complained that fake AI-generated Feynman voice videos online are “surreal,” turning this sweet memory into a debate over whether even dead geniuses can escape the content machine.
Key Points
- •Danny Hillis recounts that Richard Feynman agreed to work at Hillis’ new company after initially reacting skeptically to the idea of a million-processor parallel computer.
- •The article says Feynman’s background in computing dated to Los Alamos, where he supervised human computers and helped deploy plug-programmable tabulating machines for physical simulation.
- •Hillis met Feynman through Carl Feynman while working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab on the concept that became the Connection Machine.
- •After the company was incorporated in the Boston area, Feynman asked for a concrete assignment and was tasked with analyzing the Connection Machine’s message router.
- •The article explains that the machine’s communication design used a 20-dimensional hypercube because directly wiring every pair of one million processors would require 10^12 wires.