Here in New Zealand in the town where I live is a big white concrete building down by the river in town. This building is now a law firm but back in the day this building contained a Sperry Mainframe.
Said mainframe was owned and operated by the police and held information on pretty much everyone in the country.
As to be expected nobody trusts governments and it was highly controversial.
So much so that back in the 80’s a guy made a home made bomb and tried to blow up the building. All he successfully did however was blow himself up and cause a big mess to be cleaned up.
Here are some fun reads on the subject. I’ll add more info in time.
It was a sad case. I worked with someone, into punk, who knew the bomber personally, and on hearing the news, not identifying the bomber, immediately feared it was his friend.
His friends were adamant he was not a nutter, but I can’t help suspecting drug induced psychosis.
FWIW I got a job at Unisys in the New Year of '87, the year before they got the contract to supply 1990 Commonwealth Games with information systems (they started work on the infrastucture in September '87), as opposed to IBM being used for Web Server and data collection.
There were Ministry of Police tagged Sperry terminals waiting to be fixed in a back room of the repair workshop, and you were not allow to go near them, let alone touch them, unless you had security clearence to do so. There was only one guy there allowed to work on them, and he was still on holiday …
The Sperry terminals could dial-in back to the “Wanaganui Computer”. Later on, after the system was upgraded, the public became aware that the system was “a little bit open to simple access” (my words - ie it barely qualified as hacking), and that various individuals who were not the Police had had access because of that, for years.
I have vague memories of the bombing, when I think about it, I see a picture of the wall from outside with a “sprinkle” of shrapnel in it, and a Police tape quarden.
For those that dont know, in 1986 the newly formed Unisys bought Wang (or maybe Wang NZ or Wang Australasia - my tutor was an ex-Wang Regional manager, thats how I got the job at Unisys), after Sperry & Burroughs became one company
In the Auckland office, there was a storage room in the entrance to the right, on the opposite side of the stairs up to management, that had some “cool” Sperry and Burrorughs gear in it, the same sort of “wierd” and “escoteric” equipment they were finding in the Computer Reset Warehouse in Texas during the 1st Covid lockdown …
Future location of Digital Equipment Corporation headquarters at the 57,000 square foot “Mill” in Massachusetts, New England, built by Henry Maynard and producing clocks.
E. Remington & Sons introduces first commercially viable typewriter, the Model 1 Remington, that uses the QWERTY keyboard layout.
The Remington Standard 2 typewriter upstrike machine was produced and sold in considerable numbers with the major improvement of adding the ‘Shift’ key to type capital letters.
William Seward Burroughs invented the first recording adding machine.
American Arithmometer Company is incorporated.
Creating a commercially viable version proved difficult, and it was not until 1892 that Burroughs was able to patent a salable model.
Burroughs Arithmometer was awarded the Franklin Institute’s John Scott Medal in honor of his invention.
American Arithmometer Company renames itself Burroughs Adding Machine Company
Burroughs moves to Detroit, beginning construction on a huge plant. The company soon becomes the biggest adding machine company in America.
Remington Typewriter Company introduces first “noiseless” typewriter.
Sperry Gyroscope Company, founded by electrical inventor Elmer Ambrose Sperry, begins to manufacture and sell navigational equipment for ships and aircraft.
Burroughs Adding introduces first adding-subtracting machine.
George Julius had invented a mechanical “totalisator” that was first used in New Zealand in 1913.
Burroughs Adding sold more than 90 different data processing machines, mainly to accountants.
Accountants formed the core customer base, and in 1917 Burroughs increased courtship of those customers with the debut of a magazine devoted to accounting called Burroughs Clearing House.
Burroughs growth continued in 1921 with the acquisition of Moon-Hopkins Billing Machine
Burroughs Adding Machine introduces the direct-multiplication billing machine.
Remington Typewriter introduces America’s first electric typewriter.
Burroughs introduces first portable adding machine, weighing 20 pounds.
Rand Kardex, led by James Rand, Jr., merges with Remington Typewriter to form Remington Rand.
Burroughs ships its one millionth adding machine.
Sperry Corporation formed as a holding company for a number of smaller entities including the original Sperry Gyroscope, Ford Instrument Company, Intercontinental Aviation, Inc., North American Aviation Company, Curtiss-Wright Corporation, and others.
-1945. The Sperry S-1 precision bombsight becomes “standard” equipment when used in some United States Army Air Force bombers early in World War II. Burroughs manufactured Norden bombsight and Sperry bombsight prove instrumental in the winning air campaign against Axis powers in World War II.
The beginning of the super computer wars.
-1946. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly develop Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), the world’s first large-scale, general-purpose digital computer, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering. ENIAC is 100 times faster than any other previous computer.
UNIVAC design work was started by their company, Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), and was completed after the company had been acquired by Remington Rand, where Eckert and Mauchly now reported to Leslie Groves, the retired army general who had previously managed building the Pentagon and the Manhattan Project, where he was exposed to ENIAC.
Remington Rand 409 designed as the world’s first business computer.
EMCC built a computer called BINAC (BINary Automatic Computer) for Northrop Aviation. The BINAC was an advanced bit-serialbinary computer with two independent CPUs, each with its own 512-word acoustic mercury delay-linememory. The CPUs continuously compared results to check for errors caused by hardware failures.
EMCC’s 1944 proposal EDVAC is installed in Building 328 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory at an estimated cost of 100K to build (final costs were closer to ENIAC’s 500k). Raytheon company was a subcontractor on EDVAC machines. The EDVAC was a binary serial computer with automatic addition, subtraction, multiplication, programmed division and automatic checking with an ultrasonic serial memory capacity of 1,024 44-bit words, thus giving a memory, in modern terms, of 5.6 Kilobytes.
EMCC’s chairman and chief financial backer Henry L. Straus dies in an airplane crash on October 25, 1949. George Julius had invented a mechanical “totalisator” that was first used in New Zealand in 1913. Straus devised an “electromechanical totalisator”, and received help from General Electric’s Remote Control Division, who supplied the electric relays and rotary switches to compute odds.
I believe the plane crash was not an accident. Why would the American Totalisator Company of Balitimore abandon a 40% stake in a company that had previously delivered 3 computers, with contracts worth $1.2 million, after only 1 year of investment. Besides being a “tall poppy” in the horse racing and betting industry as a result, Straus was able to garner multiple million dollar (mostly miltary) computer contracts for EMCC within 12 months of being there. Something does not smell right here, this was right in the middle of the postwar boom in Las Vegas.
February 10, Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC) and the UNIVAC project are acquired by Remington Rand, after the death of Henry L. Straus
Remington Rand delivers UNIVAC, the first commercial computer, to the United States Census Bureau.
Following a lengthy series of political maneuvering in Washington, Engineering Research Associates is purchased by Remington Rand. Later their founding members leave with Cray Seymour and William Norris to create Control Data Corporation (CDC). The rest of the emploryees stayed and went on to pioneer a number of early command and control and guidance systems for ICBMs and satellites. There they were known as the Military Division, which was later renamed the Aerospace Division.
The UNIVAC makes history by predicting the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as United States president before polls close. The fifth machine (built for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission) was used by CBS to predict the result of the 1952 presidential election. With a sample of a mere 5.5% of the voter turnout, it famously predicted an Eisenhower landslide.
The ILLIAC I ( Illi nois A utomatic C omputer ), a pioneering computer in the ILLIAC series of computers built in 1952 by the University of Illinois, was the first computer built and owned entirely by a United States educational institution. Unlike most computers of its era, the ILLIAC I and ORDVAC computers (and SILLIAC finished in 1956) were twin copies of the same design, with software compatibility. Visiting scholars from Japan assisted in the design of the ILLIAC series of computers, and later developed the MUSASINO-1 computer in Japan.
A successor to the ENIAC (along with EDVAC built earlier), ORDVAC was based on the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann, which came to be known as the von Neumann architecture. The ORDVAC was the first computer to have a compiler. Abe Taub, Sylvian Ray, and Donald B. Gillies assisted in the checkout of ORDVAC, which passed its acceptance tests on March 6, 1952, at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Among the ORDVAC programmers were Martin Davis and Elsie Shutt. ORDVAC and its successor at Aberdeen Proving Ground, BRLESC, used their own unique notation for hexadecimal numbers. Instead of the sequence A B C D E F universally used today, the digits ten to fifteen were represented by the letters K S N J F L (King Sized Numbers Just for Laughs), corresponding to the teleprinter characters on five-track paper tape. The manual that was used by the military in 1958 used the name sexadecimal for the base 16 number system.
The concept of building a computer using an array of processors came to Daniel Slotnick while working as a programmer on the IAS machine in 1952. Slotnick raised the idea at the IAS, but John von Neumann dismissed it as requiring “too many tubes”. This would become the basis of the ILLIAC IV.
When the Defense Department awarded the design contract for the new SAGE early-warning computer system in 1952, Burroughs, IBM, RCA, Remington Rand, and Sylvania were all prime choices.
Burroughs introduces first 10-key adding machine.
Sperry merged with Remington Rand Inc., becoming Sperry Rand Corporation. The manufacturer jumped into the computer business, merging with Remington Rand, whose history dated back farther than Burroughs or Sperry. Over the next decade Sperry would go on to introduced around 100 computer products for commercial and military use. Both ERA and Eckert–Mauchly were folded into a single division as Sperry-UNIVAC.
Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson use ILLIAC I to compose the Illiac Suite which was one of the first pieces of music to be written with the aid of a computer.
United States government starts using the UNIVAC-1 weather forecasting.
Burroughs introduced its first commercial electronic computer and acquired ElectroData Corporation, a leading maker of high-speed computers.
Mathematician Donald B. Gillies, physicist James E. Snyder, and astronomers George C. McVittie, S. P. Wyatt, Ivan R. King and George W. Swenson of the University of Illinois used the ILLIAC I computer to calculate the orbit of the Sputnik 1 satellite within two days of its launch.
Ken Olsen & Harlen Anderson start producing “single step” logic modules in 8500 square feet of the “Mill”, the beginning of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). They are told “Don’t put Computer in the name, you wont make any money”.
After seeing most of there designs being in the Sperry-UNIVAC Division, but not being allowed to build computers themselves, many ERA members along with Crey Seymour and William Norris leave Sperry Rand to form Control Data Corporation in
After completing his PhD and some post-doc work, Slotnick ended up at IBM. By this time, for scientific computing at least, tubes and drums had been replaced with transistors and core memory. The idea of parallel processors working on different streams of data from a drum no longer had the same obvious appeal. Nevertheless, further consideration showed that parallel machines could still offer significant performance in some applications; Slotnick and a colleague, John Cocke, wrote a paper on the concept.
Burroughs also entered the field of automated office machines, introducing its Sensitronic electronic bank bookkeeping machine.
Burroughs entered the computer field during the tenure of President John Coleman, whose last major act as president was to negotiate a partnership agreement between his company’s computer operations and those of RCA, which was also looking for a way to catch up to IBM through a pooling of financial resources. RCA approved the agreement in 1959, but Coleman died before he could sway Burroughs’s board of directors, and the plan was never realized. Business historian Robert Sobel has written that the Burroughs-RCA partnership might have produced “the best possible challenger for IBM.”
Burroughs pioneers use of magnetic ink character recognition (MICR).
Under a contract from the US Air Force’s RADC, Slotnik was able to build a team to design a system with 1,024 bit-serial ALUs, known as “processing elements” or PE’s. This design was given the name SOLOMON, after King Solomon, who was both very wise and had 1,000 wives.
Digital Equipment Corporation build the 1st PDP-1 prototype.
DEC start selling the PDP-1, an 18-bit wide “minicomputer”, with 4096 words as standard, using magnetic-core memory.
Sperry Rand’s Ship Inertial Navigation System (SINS) enables the USS Triton submarine to circumnavigate the world without surfacing.
Grace Hopper’s co-creation of the UNIVAC proves instrumental to the Apollo missions, which require a different form of communication than the Earth-orbiting Mercury.
United States Census Bureau purchases two UNIVAC 1105 computers for the 1960 census.
The first version of the PLATO computer-based education system was implemented on the ILLIAC I by a team led by Donald Bitzer. It serviced a single user. In early 1961, version 2 of PLATO serviced two simultaneous users.
A formal design of the ILLIAC IV did not start until 1960, when Slotnick was working at Westinghouse Electric and arranged development funding under a US Air Force contract.
the game DarwinDarwin was a programming game invented in August 1961 by Victor A. Vyssotsky, Robert Morris Sr., and M. Douglas McIlroy. (Dennis Ritchie is sometimes incorrectly cited as a co-author, but was not involved.) The game was developed at Bell Labs, and played on an IBM 7090 mainframe there. The game was only played for a few weeks before Morris developed an “ultimate” program that eventually brought the game to an end, as no-one managed to produce anything that could defeat it.
Burroughs launched the B5000 mainframe computer, which used dual processors and virtual memory.
IBM 7030 Stretch Computer, designed after the ILLIAC II, but also before the transistor was invented. Remained the fastest computer in the world (according to IBM) until the release of the CDC 6600 in 1964.
DECUS, the DEC user group created.
DEC release the 12-bit LINC with CRT based console and tape based software. The University of Wisconson used these to develop a “patient diagnostic system”.
Spacewar! is a space combatvideo game developed in 1962 by Steve Russell in collaboration with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob Saunders, Steve Piner, and others. It was written for the newly installed DECPDP-1minicomputer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After its initial creation, Spacewar! was expanded further by other students and employees of universities in the area, including Dan Edwards and Peter Samson. It was also spread to many of the few dozen installations of the PDP-1 computer, making Spacewar! the first known video game to be played at multiple computer installations.
Proposed in 1958, the ILLIAC II had been designed before transistors had been invented. Many on the design team felt that the later IBM Stretch computer design had a few to many “innovation similarities”. The ILLIAC II entered the Guiness Book of World Record upon completion of its bring-up validation, confirming previous Mersenne prime numbers, and finding 3 more previously unknown. The ILLIAC II was the first computer to incorporate Speed-Independent Circuitry, invented by faculty member David E. Muller. Speed-Independent Circuitry is a class of asynchronous digital logic based on the Muller C-element. This digital logic, being asynchronous, runs at full speed of transistor propagation and requires no clocks.
When the funding for what would become the ILLIAC IV ended in 1964, Slotnick moved to the University of Illinois and joined the Illinois Automatic Computer (ILLIAC) team. With funding from Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), they began the design of a newer concept with 256 64-bit processors instead of the original concept with 1,024 1-bit processors.
CDC 6600 Supercomputer introduced by Control Data Corporation.
DEC install a PDP-6 timeshare and mainframe system at the University of Western Australia.
Sperry introduces the UNIVAC 1108, the first multiprocessor computer.
DEC release the 12-Bit PDP-8, the software for this would still be able to run on VAX/VMS systems released 10 years later, and used on original hardware until the late 90’s.
CSIRO CDC 3600 Supercomputer, from Control Data Corporation. Three times faster than the IBM Stretch Computer.
The ILLIAC III was a fine-grained SIMDpattern recognition computer built by the University of Illinois. The machine was destroyed in a fire, caused by a Variac shorting on one of the wooden-top benches, in 1968. It was rebuilt in the early 1970s, and the core parallel-processing element of the machine, the Pattern Articulation Unit, was successfully implemented. In spite of this and the productive exploration of other advanced concepts, such as multiple-radix arithmetic, the project was eventually abandoned.
Burroughs scored a major coup when the Defense Department awarded it the contract to build the ILLIAC IV supercomputer ( having teamed up with Texas Instruments ), which had been designed by the Automated Computer team at the University of Illinois.
BRLESC II, using integrated circuits, became operational in November 1967; it was designed to be 200 times faster than ORDVAC.
A UNIVAC 1108, the first multiprocessor system, processes the 1970 United States Census.
DEC start selling the PDP-11, 150 sell in the 1st week, and they would continue to sell them for another 20+ years, with over 500,000 installations. Their software too, would run on the VAX/VMS systems released 6 years later.
The new Chippewa Lab was set up during the middle of the 6600 project, although it does not seem to have delayed the project. Cray had become increasingly annoyed at what he saw as interference from CDC management. Cray decided that in order to continue development he would have to move from St. Paul, far enough that it would be too long a drive for a “quick visit” and long-distance telephone charges would be just enough to deter most calls, yet close enough that real visits or board meetings could be attended without too much difficulty. After some debate, Norris backed him and set up a new laboratory on land Cray owned in his hometown of Chippewa Falls.
The ILLIAC II computer was disassembled roughly a decade after its construction. By this time the hundreds of modules were obsolete scrap; many faculty members took components home to keep. Donald B. Gillies kept 12 (mostly control) modules. His family donated 10 of these modules and the front panel to the University of Illinois CS department in 2006.
The ILLIAC IV was 10 to 20 times faster than any existing supercomputer and was delivered to NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. While the machine was being built at Burroughs, the university began building a new facility to house it. Political tension over the funding from the US Department of Defense led to the ARPA and the University fearing for the machine’s safety. When the first 64-processor quadrant of the machine was completed, it was shipped off to NASA.
Control Data CDC 6600 Supercomputer, Naval Weather Global tracking Climate, part of a world wide wheather network of some 130 nations in the World Meteorlogical Organisation network, recording 4000 bits per minute continuously 24 hours 7 days a week, providing WEAX & OTSR on demand.
Foremost among MacDonald’s talents was a genius for salesmanship, and Burroughs’s efforts to market its high-speed accounting machines won a considerable chunk of the market from rival NCR. In 1974 Burroughs entered the facsimile-equipment business when it acquired Graphic Services for $30 million.
After three years of thorough modification to fix various flaws, ILLIAC IV was connected to the ARPANET for distributed use in November 1975, becoming the first network-available supercomputer, beating the Cray-1 by nearly 12 months. Running at half its design speed, the one-quadrant ILLIAC IV delivered 50 MFLOP peak, making it the fastest computer in the world at that time. It is also credited with being the first large computer to use solid-state memory, as well as the most complex computer built to date, with over 1 million gates. Generally considered a failure due to massive budget overruns, the design was instrumental in the development of new techniques and systems for programming parallel systems. In the 1980s, several machines based on ILLIAC IV concepts were successfully delivered.
Cray Seymour leaves CDC’s Chippewa Falls laboratory supercomputer design team to start Cray Reaserch, anouncing the Cray-1.
Digital Equipment Corpration introduce DECnet, the beginning of inter-machine networking.
DEC start releasing the VAX/VMS system, allowing 10 year old PDP-8, and 6 year old PDP-11 software to run without changes, and would continue releasing new VAX/VMS systems for the next 25 years.
Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. By 1976 a team of 6 women were able to wire up a Cray-1 in 3 months with 0 wiring errors , halving the time needed to build a Cray-1, and about a quarter if the time it took other companies to build their supercomputers. Cray Reasearch continued to hold the title of fastest computer in the world until 1999.
This release marked the end of the 1st super computer wars, the 2nd “war” would not start for another 30-40 years.
Sperry introduces first cache memory disk subsystem.
Digital Equipment Corporation introduce DECnet II with multi-vendor compatibility, which leads to the beginning of “common use” of the Internet.
Sperry Rand Corporation was renamed Sperry Corporation.
Burroughs golf scoring service first introduced at the 109th Open Championship in Muirfield, Scotland
Customer complaints came to a head, when 129 Burroughs users sued the company over product unreliability and difficulty in getting their machines fixed.
On 7 September 1981, after nearly 10 years of operation, the ILLIAC IV was turned off. After NASA’s Ames programmers wrote their own version of FORTRAN, CFD, and learned how to parallel I/O into the limited PEMs. On problems that could be parallelized the machine was still the fastest in the world, outperforming the CDC 7600 ( the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, and slightly faster than its rival, the IBM System/360, Model 195) by two to six times.
ILLIAC IV decomissioned, which ended NASA’s advanced computing division.
Digital Equipment Corporation introduces EasyNET, with OSI Standards for Ethernet LAN’s enabling Peer-to-Peer computing, becoming the largest private network with 27,000 nodes world wide.
Cray Research release the Cray X-MP as the “cleaned up” successor to the 1975 Cray-1, and was the world’s fastest computer from 1983 to 1985 with a quad-processor system performance of 800 MFLOPS.[4] The principal designer was Steve Chen. Running the Cray Operating System (COS) introduced in 1976, until 1984, the X-MP then ran the UNICOS operating system, a range of Unix and Linux variants developed by Cray. The X-MP was proof that Cray Research could build a computer without Seymour Cray at the helm.
Core War reserects the 1961 game Darwin and the Creeper, Reaper types rumored to exist at the time.
Cray Research release the Cray-2. At 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, it was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing the Cray X-MP in top spot, which was replaced in that spot by the Cray Y-MP in 1988. The Cray-2 was the first of Seymour Cray’s designs to successfully use multiple CPUs. The new Cray UNICOS OS is sold to previous installation. It provides network clustering and source code compatibility layers for some other Unixes. The original UNICOS was based on UNIX System V Release 2, and had many Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) features (e.g., computer networking and file system enhancements) added to it.
Blumenthal eventually decided that economies of scale were necessary to compete with IBM. In 1985 Burroughs launched a $65-per-share takeover bid, worth $3.7 billion.
In December Sperry Corporation sold Sperry Aerospace to Honeywell, and it later sold off Memorex’s marketing arm.
Burroughs Corporation acquired Sperry Corporation in a hostile takeover. Unisys Corporation is one of the largest providers of computer systems, software, and related technologies in the world, serving some 60,000 organizations and businesses in more than 100 countries.
Unisys acquired Timeplex, a high-tech communications-equipment company, for $300 million and Convergent Technologies, a maker of office workstations (and at that time, owner of Plan9 operating system), for $351 million .
Cray Research release the Cray Y-MP as the successor to the Cray X-MP, which performs 1x 10 to the 9th calculations per second, a 1000 fold performance gain over the Cray-1. The Y-MP retained software compatibility with the X-MP, but extended the address registers from 24 to 32 bits. High-density VLSI ECL technology was used and a new liquid-cooling system was devised. The Y-MP could be equipped with two, four or eight vector processors, with two functional units each and a clock cycle time of 6 ns (167 MHz). Peak performance was thus 333 megaflops per processor. Main memory comprised 128, 256 or 512 MB of SRAM.
Cray Seymour takes 100 Miliion to finish the Cray-3, and spins off Cray Computer Corporation.
Unisys company had begun to move into the small and mid-sized computer market, adopting AT&T’s popular Unix operating system as the standard configuration for Unisys machines.
According to Paul Mann of Aviation Week & Space Technology, Unisys settled its part in the Operation 111 Wind court case in September 1991, pleading guilty to fraud and bribery and agreeing to pay a record of up to $190 million in damages, penalties, and fines.
DEC announced Alpha 21064 on 25 February 1992, a 64-bit superpipelined dual-issue superscalar microprocessor that executes instructions in-order.
Unisys introduces 2200/500, the first mainframe based on complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology.
Using DEC’s new 64-bit CPU’s, Cray Research delivered a prototype installed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in early September 1993, the T3D (Torus, 3-Dimensional). It was a first attempt at a massively parallelsupercomputer architecture. The T3D consisted of between 32 and 2048 Processing Elements (PEs), each comprising a 150 MHz DEC Alpha 21064 (EV4) microprocessor and either 16 or 64 MB of DRAM. PEs were grouped in pairs, or nodes, which incorporated a 6-way processor interconnect switch. These switches had a peak bandwidth of 300 MB/second in each direction and were connected to form a three-dimensional torus network topology. The T3D was designed to be hosted by a Cray Y-MP Model E, M90 or C90-series “front-end” system and rely on it and its UNICOS operating system for all I/O and most system services. The T3D PEs ran a simple microkernel called UNICOS MAX.
Problem finishing the Cray-3 force Cray Computer Corporation (CCC) into bankruptcy.
The 1st generation Cray T3E was Cray Research’s 2nd generation massively parallel supercomputer (MPP) architecture, launched in late November 1995. The first T3E-600 was installed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in 1996, with 300 MHz DEC Alpha 21164 (EV5).
Cray Seymour died on October 5, 1996, two weeks after his automobile was struck on the highway and rolled several times, at the age of 71. Cray frequently cited two important aspects to his design philosophy: remove heat, and ensure that all signals that are supposed to arrive somewhere at the same time do indeed arrive at the same time. His computers were equipped with built-in cooling systems, extending ultimately to coolant channels cast into the mainframes and thermally coupled to metal plates within the circuit boards, and to systems immersed in coolants. Cray addressed the problem of clock skew by ensuring that every signal path in his later computers was the same electrical length, so that values that were to be acted upon at a particular time were indeed all valid values. When required, he would run the traces back and forth on the circuit boards until the desired length was achieved, and he employed Maxwell’s equations in design of the boards to ensure that any radio frequency effects which altered the signal velocity and hence the electrical path length were accounted for.
Unisys launches a seven-year project for the United States Social Security Administration to install more than 1,700 LANS, 70,000 workstations and 4,000 servers at 1,500 locations in one of the largest IT deployments in the federal government.
Unisys launches initiative to bring enterprise-class capabilities to Windows NT environments with Cellular Multi-Processing (CMP).
The Cray Division of SGI release the 2nd generation T3E MPP (Massively Parallel Processor) system, the T3E-1350 uses 675 MHz DEC Alpha 21164A (EV56), which is also 1000 fold increase in performance over the Cray Y-MP. A 1480-processor T3E-1200 was the first supercomputer to achieve a performance of more than 1 teraflops running a computational science application, in 1998.
AMD developed two Alpha 21264 (EV6) compatible chipsets, the Irongate, also known as the AMD-751, and its successor, Irongate-2, also known as the AMD-761. These chipsets were developed for their Athlon microprocessors but due to AMD licensing the EV6 bus used in the Alpha from Digital, the Athlon and Alpha 21264 were compatible in terms of bus protocol. The Athlon utilizes the Alpha 21264’s EV6 bus architecture with double data rate (DDR) front-side bus (FSB.
Unisys develops a fingerprint ID system for South Africa that targets more than 40 million people, as well as the world’s first large scale multi-application smart card for Malaysia.
Unisys begins shipping ES7000 servers - the first in the market to take advantage of Windows 2000 Datacenter Server’s support for 32-processor scalability
Tera Computer Company aquire the Cray name and the Cray Divison of SGI, including their government research contracts.
The Alpha 21264C, code-named EV68CB was a derivative of the Alpha 21264. It was available at clock frequencies of 1.0, 1.25 and 1.33 GHz. The EV68CB contained 15.5 million transistors and measured 120 mm². It was fabricated by IBM in a 0.18 μm CMOS process with seven levels of copper interconnect and low-K dielectric. It was packaged in a 675-pad flip-chip ceramic land grid array (CLGA) measuring 49.53 by 49.53 mm. The EV68CB used a 1.7 V power supply, dissipating a maximum of 64 W at 1.0 GHz, 75 W at 1.25 GHz and 80 W at 1.33 GHz.
The Alpha 21264D, code-named EV68CD is a faster derivative fabricated by IBM.
Unisys ES7000/one Enterprise Server gives clients a foundation for combining Windows and Linux applications in their data centers.
Unisys opens a data center in Eagan, Minnesota with innovative “green” design - from energy-efficient servers to restoration of surrounding prairie lands.
Cray Inc. release the Cray XT3, which again is 1000 fold increase in performance over the Cray X3E.
Unisys helps Beijing Airport prepare for the 2008 Olympic Games by serving as the master systems integrator for a brand new Terminal 3 to handle soaring traffic.
On March 10, 2009, the company was included in Moody’s Investor Services’ “Bottom Rung” list of 283 companies that were considered the most likely to default on their debt.
Most from here on sound like press releases, but they are still factual in some way …
Unisys completes security certification for 14 multi-client service centers worldwide to help clients maintain stringent security for business-critical information.
Unisys refreshes its solution portfolio with innovative services and technologies, including Converged Remote Infrastructure Management, Smart On-site, and a range of new ClearPath® enhancements.
Unisys announces new, focused strategy building on the company’s strengths in growing markets of security, data center transformation and outsourcing, end user outsourcing and support services, and application modernization.
Unisys launches the Unisys Hosted Secure Private Cloud Solution, giving clients the primary benefits of both provider-hosted clouds and private clouds.
Unisys debuts secure partitioning (s-Par®), a Unisys-developed virtualization technology for Intel processor-based ClearPath® servers.
Unisys sells its Medicare processing Health Information Management service to Molina Healthcare for $135 million.
Unisys rolls out its most powerful ClearPath® system to date - the Libra and Dorado 800 Series.
Unisys unveils Stealth™ Solutions for Secure Virtual Terminal, a solution residing on a federal government-certified USB device to protect mobile users’ data.
Application development services of Unisys Global Services, India, achieves CMMI-Dev version 1.3 Maturity Level 5.
Unisys launches the ClearPath® Libra 6200 high-end server and other new members of the ClearPath family.
Unisys announces availability of its Unisys Stealth® for Mobile solution using microsegmentation to address the major security concerns facing enterprises as growing numbers of their employees use consumer devices at work.
Unisys announces its new Forward!™ enterprise computing platform - a breakthrough fabric-based solution that brings unmatched levels of mission-critical security, availability, scalability and predictable computing performance.
Unisys debuts the first ClearPath® systems making use of an advanced fabric-based architecture that enables clients to run OS 2200 and MCP applications alongside Linux and Windows in the same Intel-based computing platform.
Unisys becomes a global managed services partner to ServiceNow to deliver integrated service management solutions that help clients in their digital business transformation.
Unisys integrates the capabilities of the ClearPath® and Forward™ platforms to create the consolidated ClearPath Forward®. Unisys announces a range of advanced security products and solutions, including a new software-based release of Unisys Stealth®, for protection of digital physical assets.
Unisys inaugurates its newest United States client service center in Augusta, Georgia, helping spur that city’s growing economy and supporting its emergence as a global hub for cybersecurity.
Unisys takes its flagship ClearPath® software virtual with a hardware-independent version of the MCP operating environment ready to run on any Intel x86 server, whether from Unisys or another provider.
Unisys wins Gold at the ITSMA Marketing Excellence Awards in the “Ensuring Customer Success” category for the Unisys Closed-loop Client Success Program.
Latest version of Unisys Stealth® microsegmentation security software introduces greater interoperability and scalability to protect data in hybrid cloud environments.
Unisys launches CloudForte®, an agile and innovative managed services offering designed to accelerate the move to the cloud.
Suffered from Covid-19 pandemic outbreak and resulting lockdown, just like everyone else (except Amazon, Ebay and Uber Eats).
Unisys Stealth® 5.0 recognized as hottest new cybersecurity product at RSA Conference 2020.
So next time you feel like cursing you computer, your OS, the government, the police, Amazon, Apple, Google, FaceBook or your phone, scroll through this list to find where it all started to go wrong, or who help promote ideas and products that helped cause the world to be the way it is now …
