Computer Consoles Inc.
Computer Consoles Inc. or CCI was a
.History
Computer Consoles Inc. (CCI, incorporated May 20, 1968) was founded by three Xerox employees, Edward H. Nutter, Alfred J. Moretti, and Jeffrey Tai, to develop one of the earliest versions of a smart computer terminal, principally for the telephony market. Raymond J. Hasenauer (Manufacturing), Eiji Miki (Electronic design), Walter Ponivas (Documentation) and James M. Steinke (Mechanical design) joined the company at its inception. Due to the state of the art in electronics at the time, this smart terminal was the size of an average sized office desk.
Automating Operator Services
Due to the success of the smart computer terminal, and the expertise the company gained in understanding Operator Services, the company started development programs to offer networked computer systems that provided contract managed access time, specified as a guaranteed number of seconds to paint the operator's first screen of information, to various telephony databases such as directory assistance and intercept messages. The largest such system was designed and installed for British Telecom to provide initially Directory Assistance throughout Great Britain and Ireland. These systems combined Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 computers with custom hardware and software developed by CCI.
Automatic Voice Response
To provide higher levels of automation to operator services, CCI introduced in the early 1980s various Automatic Voice Response (AVR) systems tightly integrated with its popular Directory Assistance systems. AVR provided voice response of the customer requested data, almost universally starting the prompt with a variant of the phrase, "The number is". Early systems were based on very small vocabulary synthesised speech chips, follow-on systems utilized 8-bit PCM, and later ADPCM voice playback using audio authored either by CCI or the local phone company.
Digital Switching
To provide even higher levels of automation, CCI started a very aggressive program in the early 1980s to develop a PCM digital telephone switching system targeted for automated, user defined call scenarios. Initial installations handled intercept and calling card calls by capturing
PERPOS, Perpetual Processing Operating System
To provide better control over transaction processing, significant improvements in fault tolerance, and richer support for networking, CCI developed PERPOS, a Unix derivative that provided integrated support for real-time transaction processing, load balancing, and fault tolerant features such as hot and cold standby.
Power 5 and Power 6 computers
PERPOS was developed for a line of
Later, Computer Consoles opened a development center in
Targeted as a competitor to the Unix/VAX platform, it succeeded for solutions where processing power was paramount. Universities requiring time-shared compilation engines for their students were particularly keen. The machine suffered when applied to general purpose database application environments, not least because the I/O subsystem over-relied on the central processing power (much as the VAX did) and thus used relatively dumb I/O processors. The Power 6 running either version of Unix also suffered from the inefficient memory management inherent in BSD 4.3.[3] The core of this was the use of a 512-byte page rather than a 4-kilobyte page. Leffer et al. suggest they did this due to concerns about VAX support of 4k dynamic paging. The Power 6 had no such problems, but no operating system to support it.
The final issue with the Power 6/32 running Unix was the lack of support for symmetric multiprocessing: All system calls would have to run on the "Master" processor, forcing a dual processing machine to reschedule a process from the "slave" processor for every system call. The net result of this meant database benchmarks often ran faster on a single processor than a dual.
Office automation
Due to the success the firm had in network based data management, they partnered with, and ultimately acquired, a small company in Reston, Virginia, called RLG Corporation (named after founder Richard L Gauthier[4]), to develop a terminal-based integrated office automation system. RLG had had experience developing this kind of system for the United States Department of Transportation. The office suite, called OfficePower, provided an integrated set of functions such as word processing, spreadsheet, email, and database access via a compact desktop smart terminal backed by a mini, or super mini-computer. Although the system software was ported to various Unix variants, most installations were hosted on CCI's Power 5 and Power 6 machines running CCI's Unix ports.
One installation was at the US Naval Surface Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia; it consisted of two VAXes running 4.2BSD and a number of Power 5/20 machines running PERPOS-S. The VAXes were connected to each other by an Ethernet, but, at the time, it wasn't cost-effective to provide Ethernet adapters on all the Power 5/20 machines. The Power 5/20s were using 3Com's UNET as their TCP/IP implementation; it included an encapsulation scheme for sending IP datagrams over serial lines. Rick Adams implemented this encapsulation scheme as a line discipline for 4.2BSD; this was the origin of SLIP.
After the takeover of CCI by
CCI (Europe) Inc
CCI (Europe) Inc was the wholly owned European Sales, Marketing and Support operation based in West London and established with Richard Levy (Altergo, Wang) as European Vice President, with responsibilities for all business aspects outside of North America. Richard Levy recruited industry professionals to target specific market sectors and distribution channels for the European and International markets for the entire CCI range of computer and telephony products.
CCI (Europe) maintained close co-operation with Rochester, NY for the manufacturing, stock & shipping and Irvine, CA for planning & management. Liaising closely with the Israeli R&D operation for international systems translation, CCI Europe established a solid base in major European accounts and International third-party Distribution channels such as ICL & BT and became an integral aspect of the parent company.
CCI Israel, Inc.
CCI Israel, Inc. was a separately incorporated Delaware corporation however it was closely affiliated with the Rochester, NY, Irvine, CA and Reston, VA operations of Computer Consoles, Inc (CCI). It was first established to manage a telephony project for the Israeli national telephone company, Bezeq. The initial Israeli project was based on products developed in the Rochester-based group.
In Israel, development and installation was managed by CCI-Israel's managing director, Jacob "Jack" Mark. Mr. Mark, was earlier affiliated with the original Bell Labs team to which the core development of the Unix operating system is attributed. The small Ramat Gan-based office later grew to support the efforts of the U.S.-based CCI offices, eventually becoming a major research and development center for machine level/operating systems products, telephony products, office automation products (particularly for British and foreign language "OfficePower").
CCI Israel also undertook local development projects for major clients - notably Motorola and Israel Aircraft Industries. In the mid-1980s CCI-Israel introduced the U.S. companies' brand of 5/32 and 6/32 micro- and mini-computers to the local Israeli market. CCI-Israel - through seminars and training groups - was also instrumental in developing and popularizing the Unix operating system and the C programming language in Israel. CCI-Israel was also responsible for establishing the first Unix "User Group" in that country.
Accomplishments
CCI actively participated in various telecom and public standard bodies such as
CCI deployed the largest multi-processor, shared file-system, Unix based (PERPOS) system of the era in British Telecom in the late 1980s. The design concepts of the system were years ahead of its time. The company was also a pioneer of design and deployment of voice response and speech recognition to the public telephone networks to automate traditional operator based services.
CCI controlled over 90% of the world market for equipment to automate telephony Directory services at the time of acquisition by STC.
Acquisition by Standard Telephones and Cables
STC acquired CCI effective January 1, 1989.[5] At this time CCI was organized as two major business units: one in Rochester ("CCI - Rochester"), which manufactured telecommunications equipment, and a Computer Products Division in Irvine ("CCI - Irvine"), which manufactured computer hardware. Office systems software was produced at Reston, Virginia. In reality there was a third operation which was a financing group that held the commercial leases for equipment typically sold to telephone companies. At the time of the acquisition the lease base was rumored to be valued at over $700M US dollars.[according to whom?]
Also at the time of the acquisition, CCI was involved in a dispute with General Telephone and Electronics ("GTE") over GTE's failure to supply CCI with certain "computer chips" for a new generation of computers being developed by CCI (the "GTE litigation").
After completion of the acquisition, CCI - Rochester became a subsidiary of an STC operating unit known as STC Telecom. Shortly thereafter, the Computer Products Division at Irvine and Office Products Centre at Reston were sold to another STC operating unit, ICL,[6] for net book value of the assets. CCI - Rochester was kept under the jurisdiction of STC Telecom, which was also in the telecommunications business.
Acquisition by Northern Telecom Ltd.
STC Telecom was acquired by
Notable Historic Uses
Pixar Computer Animation Group employed a Power 6/32 machine to render the "Glass Man" sequence in Steven Spielberg's Young Sherlock Holmes movie (1985).
References
- ^ Warner, Edward (1984-11-01). "Sperry launches 7000/40 32-bit superminicomputer". Computerworld. Retrieved 2022-06-28.
- ^ "New Harris Computer Introduced". Retrieved 2011-11-04.
- ISBN 978-0201061963.
- ^ Gauthier, Richard. "Using the UNIX System" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-05-06. Retrieved 2017-08-18.
- ^ OLMOS, DAVID (1988-12-06). "Computer Consoles to Be Acquired by British Firm". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2017-08-18.
- ^ Irvine signs on, STC Gazette February 1990, STC PLC