It was indeed a Thinking Machines CM-5 — Nedry actually mentioned them in his line about how Hammond wouldn't be able to find anyone "anybody who can network 8 connection machines".
An actual assembled CM-5 actually cost closer to a million dollars.
But, from what I remember the one in the control room is a shell. In the CM-1 and CM-2, the LEDs were actual status indicators on the processors, which Tamiko Theil and the other designers had the engineers move to be at the edge of the boards, so that they'd shine through the case. Super cool.
But by the CM-5, they were run off a simple microcontroller.
They went bust not long after this movie.
I made a YouTube video on the history of the Connection Machine – it was a lot of work, and if you're interested in this sort of thing I think you'll enjoy it:
I had no idea Thinking Machine was a brand! I just thought they were "thinking machine super computers" another way of saying "artificial intelligence super computers" or "machine learning" (dunno if ML was around then :shrug:)
Then you're going to love learning that Feynman worked on them, specifically the inter-processor routing.
https://longnow.org/ideas/richard-feynman-and-the-connection...
loading story #48924755
loading story #48919015
loading story #48918926
loading story #48923877
loading story #48918119
Thinking Machines: "We are building a machine that will be proud of us."
loading story #48924527
It’s so lame they changed the LEDs to meaning nothing.
I'd heard from my wife who worked at TMs that they did this so engineers would stop "wasting" time programming animations on those lights.
The funniest part about this thing is that it seems to have had roughly the same performance of a modern day CM5 (the Raspberry kind).