I later returned the visit. This was a different side of Danny, the chief scientist and cofounder of Thinking Machines, at the time one of the hottest companies in America. He lived with his family in a huge old house off Brattle Street. Danny's energies have concentrated on getting processors to work together so that computation takes place with communicating processors, as happens with the Internet. The Net's potential to become an organism of intelligent agents interacting with each other, with an intelligence of its own that goes beyond the intelligence of the individual agents fires Danny up.
Parallel processing is the way that kind of emergent phenomenon can happen.
The Net right now is only a glimmer of that. Danny describes the Internet of today simply as a huge document that is stored in a lot of different places and that can be modified by many people at once, but essentially a document in the old sense of the word. In principle, the Internet could be done on paper, but the logistics are much better handled with the computer. His intellectual range is startling. Unlike many other people engaged in the world of computing, he does not limit himself to any particular group of colleagues.