Who owns the intellectual property regarding the Connection Machine and other products from Thinking Machines? I believe the remnants were bought by Sun, so possibly Oracle, but does anyone know?
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2While the retrowizards ponder your question, here's some fun reading material about the hiring process at Thinking Machines: thedailywtf.com/articles/Thinking-Machines – traal Jun 8 '17 at 18:21
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1Once done reading the article that @traal pointed at, also make sure to check out at least the featured comments. – a CVn Jun 9 '17 at 11:46
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1The US Trademark database seems to indicate the trademarks are all abandoned. If that's right, then no one owns them at the moment, and you could pick them up yourself if you like. – Michael Kohne Jun 9 '17 at 13:57
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4Any patents they might have at the time of their bankruptcy in 1994 would have since expired. If the trademarks have also expired, like Michael Kohne said, then the only intellectual property left would be the copyrights on the software they created. – Ross Ridge Jun 9 '17 at 16:22
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3I worked at TMC at the time it declared bankruptcy. IIRC, Sun Microsystems acquired most of the assets and employees that were not retained by the restructured company (which went from being a hardware manufacturer to data mining software). Sun was later acquired by Oracle, so I suspect they own the patents. – Barmar Jul 20 '17 at 14:44
