THINKING MACHINES GENIUS EMERGES AT DISNEY : MIT'S HILLIS JOINS ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY AT 39.

Byline: Adam Pertman The Boston Globe

It's been two life-altering years since Danny Hillis' brainchild - the self-consciously funky, mercurial Thinking Machines Corp. of Cambridge, Mass. - crashed into bankruptcy.

Since then Hillis, once a major force and colorful celebrity among the nation's computer innovators, has almost disappeared from the industry's cathode screen.

But Hillis' 4-year-old twin sons, Asa and Noah, know where to find him.

``They tell their teacher that their father works for a mouse,'' said Hillis, who seems more relaxed than he was in his high-flying Massachusetts days. ``They insist that I help Mickey Mouse get dressed. They're convinced I'm his valet.''

They may have something there.

Hillis' new job - he will divulge almost no details - essentially is to help Walt Disney Co. present its best face - and products - to the world.

``I can't talk specifics because nothing I've done is in production yet,'' he said with a reassuring smile, asserting that he was not being coy but protecting trade secrets from competitors.

What's clear, from the little Hillis will discuss, is that he's moved from a top rung of power in the computer business to a lower but potentially equally influential position in a sometimes-related field: entertainment. Indeed, it sounds like his job is to do what he wants.

Asked to spell out his duties, he says he provides technical and creative advice for virtually all of Disney's multitudinous enterprises, from tinkering with virtual-reality theme park rides to conducting research on movie special effects to brainstorming with fellow executives on marketing strategy.

``You could say I do whatever, and it's a pretty broad range of whatevers,'' explained Hillis, 39, who is the first and so-far only person recruited for the company's Fellows Program, started three months ago. His title is vice president of research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering.

``Basically,'' Hillis said earnestly, ``I'm helping them to dream about the future, to understand better, so they can do what they do better.''

But Disney? It's a long way from the East Cambridge offices of Thinking Machines, where pallid computer designers worked side by side with a multicultural melange of artists, scientists and other smart people to design one of the fastest-computers ever built.

It was a company where employees rigged the Coke machine to the payroll computer so the cost of the soda was automatically deducted from their paychecks, a company funded with money from the late CBS founder William Paley and the Pentagon alike.

Of all the creative enterprises available, Hillis says, he chose Disney because it simultaneously offered breadth, influence and a whimsical and creative climate in which to work. Besides, since the company opened a small research and development office in Cambridge several months ago, he gets to travel there frequently and check in at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he's still an adjunct professor.

It's pretty heady stuff, complete with Hollywood power lunches, elbow-rubbing with celebrities and a considerable salary. Hillis looks just as boyish as ever, but he's gained nearly 30 pounds.

If any of this has gone to Hillis' head, he deserves an Oscar nomination for concealing his ego during a recent interview. He is as self-confident as ever about his abilities, to be sure, but he remains accessibly intelligent and charming. Moreover, the travails he experienced in the supercomputer business, combined with the admittedly intimidating challenges of embarking on a complex new enterprise, seem to have sanded some of Hillis' sharper edges.

Though he was liked and respected by most of his employees at Thinking Machines - which then-Wunderkind Hillis helped found under a spotlight of glowing publicity - in the end he developed contentious relationships with some other senior managers. He also pursued business goals that, while scientifically ambitious and even visionary, proved unrealistic in practice and contributed to the firm's bankruptcy in August 1994.

A radically scaled-down version of Thinking Machines was reorganized under new leadership last year, concentrating on software and support. The company Hillis built had developed some of the world's fastest computers, called massively parallel processors, more than 100 of which are still being used in places such as the Pentagon and university research laboratories.

One of Hillis' far less sophisticated inventions also remains in operation. A hand-cranked computer that plays tick-tack-toe, which he built out of 10,000 Tinkertoys while he was a student at MIT, is on display at the Computer Museum in Boston. It hasn't lost a game yet.

Hillis suggests that one major lesson he learned from his Thinking Machines days is that affecting people's lives is at least as important as conceiving big ideas. That appeals to him about his new employer.

He also says he likes the job, which sometimes involves going to Disneyland or to see kids' movies, because it allows him to spend more time with his twins and baby daughter, India.``I now look back at the way I used to view the world, and it looks pretty one-dimensional,'' he said.

Another factor mentioned pointedly by Hillis, who spent a couple of years as a consultant based in New Mexico before he moved to California, is high among his reasons for switching careers.

``This is the first environment I ran into that had the kind of energy, the kind of creativity,'' that he initially found in computers, he said. ``I realized that, just as the space program was the big driver of technology at one time, the new driver is the entertainment industry.''