The HP Phenomenon by House Charles H.; Price Raymond L.;

Author:House, Charles H.; Price, Raymond L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2011-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile at the High End

HP’s biggest machine—the HP 3000 Series 64—was announced at the end of 1981. If HP lacked a 32-bit machine, available from all other competitors, why not label a 16-bit machine with a Series 64 name? The HP Journal story opening was decidedly upbeat:

Large enough to handle the entire data processing needs of a good-sized company, this newest member of HP’s business family has 2½ times the processing power of the HP 3000 Series 44, previously HP’s largest.... For example, Series 64 can have 144 terminals attached to it, while the Series 44 can accept only 64. Series 64’s greatly improved performance [is due to] faster operation and parallel operation. Faster operation comes from the use of emitter coupled logic (ECL), the fastest commercially available integrated circuit logic families, and from some advanced memory units. Parallel operation is made possible by a pair of arithmetic logic units, or ALUs, that share the calculating and decision making that are the basic functions of a computer.... The Series 64 can execute well over a million instructions per second (MIPS). . . . Since it is an HP 3000, the Series 64 can run programs written for other HP 3000s . . . [and] it qualifies for HP’s money-back guarantee that it will be operational at least 99% of the time.21

Although the computer business was now more than half of the company, aside from Ely, no operational manager at headquarters understood it. It wasn’t clear, though, that Ely had the right recipe either. Putting critical mass together to build an effective 32-bit computer architecture and supporting system had proven unachievable. Bob Frankenberg, a stalwart developer in Cupertino responsible for many HP 2000 line (21MX, 21LC, 21e) extensions, said,

[Young] hired Birnbaum, and Birnbaum brought in Bill Worley. We’ve got three competing designs now—the HP Labs-Birnbaum Spectrum effort, WideWord, and Vision. Amigo was another system development, aimed at highly interactive single user environments. Amigo actually started out as what one would call today a personal computer that grew into a $40,000 single-user monster. Young did wake everybody up to this mess. He insisted that we figure out whether it was going to be Vision or WideWord or RISC.

There were several task forces evaluating each one of these. The conclusion was to go with Spectrum. We were [way] behind; we had to have something revolutionary, and we needed to devote a full team. In fact, some of us thought “overdevote.” We had to have strong efforts to keep the 1000 and the 3000 alive, and we needed to free up a significant number of people for Spectrum.22

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.