Supercomputing Solutions

This was a company I worked for, in San Diego, in the Eighties. This posting is about its rise and fall.

This company was started by a man, who had been successful in another industry - he had had some kind of food company (what kind I never knew) - but in his eyes, that made him a successful businessman.

He looked around for some other industry to get into, and decided on a supercomputer. At the time, supercomputer companies, such as Cray, were getting a lot of publicity - and their computers sold for a lot of money - because they were expensive to make.

This businessman decided he would make a supercomputer that would cost less - and make a lot of money that way. So he looked around for some experts who could do this for him. The solution, that had been known for a long time, was parallel computing - break the programming task into components,  execute them simultaneously, and then combine the results.

He also found some experts that said they could do this - and they set to work to build a machine that would. The result was a huge machine (six feet tall, six feet wide, and three feet deep) with many small computers in it - each with its own hard disk. But this was not all - the really amazing part, was a huge switch, that could connect the inputs and the outputs of all these computers together - as directed by an internal program.

There was only one problem - the operating system that could manage all these components did not exist yet! The Linux operating system, that would do this, was not invented, until years later.

This company had been financed, by selling stock - which was easy at first. They even floated another sale of stock, that brought in millions of dollars.

The project manager, who was a idiot, kept telling the CEO what he wanted he hear - that there was plenty of money available. When they were burning money at an incredible rate.

Eventually the CEO was told the truth, and he held a company-wide meeting and informed everyone - that the were fired, right then, no exceptions. The stockholders got nothing, and engineers, who worked long hours, got nothing.

But I'm sure he kept a sizable amount for himself - how much we will never know.