Ben Barrett wrote: > TractorOS?? (Kubota... it was my first experience driving around an > internal combustion engine, back on the farm = )
Uh oh. Time for an ancient history lesson. Okay, kids, come along and Grampa will tell you a story about the olden days. Our story starts sometime in the mid-late 1970s when Cray introduced the Cray-1 and defined the "supercomputer" market niche. These machines had large, fast (for the time) SRAM memory, high bandwidth, a vector architecture, 64 bit integers and floats, fully custom-designed CPU, buses, memory subsystem, etc. They cost well over $1 million (which was a lot more then than it is now). Then in 1985, two companies, Convex and Alliant, created the "mini supercomputer" niche. Same architecture, but with some tradeoffs, primarily in terms of memory. They used commodity DRAM with caches, which was slower but cheaper, and they had virtual memory, which was slower but cheaper (because you needed less physical memory). These machines started around $100,000 (which was still a lot). I worked at Convex from 1985 to 1992, BTW. Moore's law marched on, and sometime around 1989 or 1990 two other companies, Stellar and Ardent, created the "personal supercomputer" niche. Same theme: vector architecture machines, but even more commodity parts and an even lower price, plus they had 3D graphics. They were about the size of a washing machine. The problem is, RISC microprocessors were getting fast around then, and the personal supercomputers couldn't compete with high end workstations from IBM, DEC, MIPS, Silicon Graphics (yes, I worked for SGI from 1994-1999) and others. So Stellar and Ardent had a hard time. In 1991, they merged and formed Stardent. Around 1993, Stardent more or less folded. Kubota, the tractor company, who had been an early investor in Ardent, bought Stardent, renamed it Kubota Pacific, and redirected it to making Alpha CPU based graphics workstations. They sold a few and made a little money, but eventually folded. (1994? 1995?) Now run along, Kiddies. Grampa needs his nap. -- Bob Miller K<bob> kbobsoft software consulting http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
