Trilogy Systems
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Nasdaq: TRILF | |
Founded | 1980 |
Defunct | 1985[1] |
Successor | merged into Elxsi[1] |
Headquarters | Cupertino, California, United States |
Key people | Gene Amdahl, Carl Amdahl, Clifford Madden |
Trilogy Systems Corporation was a computer systems company started in 1980. Originally called ACSYS, the company was founded by
Amdahl leaves Amdahl
Large computers of the 1960s and 70s were physically constructed using small
At Amdahl Corporation, Amdahl was able to produce systems compatible with the
In the late 1970s, Amdahl began the process of designing the replacement for their 470 series. The new machine, the 580, had 50 chips on a board and 77 boards in total. There was an inherent catch-22 in this design; by placing more components on a card they were increasing the chances that a given card would fail, so there was pressure to use more, simpler boards. However, doing so increased the number of boards, to the point where inter-board delays made timing constraints very difficult to achieve. Fujitsu decided to move ahead with the concept even though Amdahl himself was increasingly against the design.[3]
Trilogy forms
In 1980, he decided he had lost control of the company and decided to leave. Still interested in the compatible mainframe market, Amdahl formed Trilogy in 1980.
The downside to this approach was that if any one of the "circuit boards" was non-functional, the entire wafer would have to be discarded. The chance this would happen would approach 100% at the complexity levels involved. As with other WSI projects, Trilogy's chip design relied on redundancy, that is replication of
The large chip size demanded larger minimum dimensions for the
Alongside the advances in chip manufacturing, advanced chip packaging techniques were also pursued by the company. These included vertical stacking of computer chips and chip-to-chip interconnect technology that used copper conductors and polyimide insulation that allowed for extremely dense packing of signal wiring. Though overall system power consumption would be lower, the power dissipation would be much more concentrated at the single large chip. This required new cooling techniques such as sealed heat exchangers to be developed.
The company was beset by many problems. Gene Amdahl was involved in a car accident and preoccupied with the ensuing lawsuit. Madden, the company's president, died from a brain tumor. Their
In 1983, the company had an
Changing focus
By mid-1984, the company decided it was too difficult to manufacture their computer design. Gene Amdahl stepped down as CEO and Henry Montgomery was brought in as replacement.
The new leadership redirected the company to be a technology provider to other computer companies. The only major customer was Digital Equipment, which paid $10 million for the rights to the interconnect and cooling technologies. These were used for its VAX 9000 mainframe computers. Years later, the manufacturing difficulties of the copper/polyimide technology restricted DEC's ability to ship its mainframes.
At the end of 1985, Gene Amdahl, as company chairman, decided to stop all Trilogy development and use the remaining $70 million of the raised capital to buy Elxsi, a minicomputer start-up company. In 1989, Gene Amdahl left the merged company.
Trilogy Systems was known as one of the largest financial failures in Silicon Valley before the burst of Internet/dotcom bubble in 2001. In describing the company, financial columnists coined the term "crater" as describing companies that consumed huge amounts of venture capital and later imploded to leave nothing for its investors.
References
- ^ a b "In Memoriam: Gene Amdahl 1922-2015". Communications of the ACM. November 12, 2015.
- ^ "ACSYS"&pg=PA11 "Trilogy Systems Corp". Computerworld. 15 Jun 1981. pp. 11–12. Retrieved 4 December 2015.
- ^ a b c d Wagner 1997, p. 9.
- ^ Wagner 1997, p. 10.
- Wagner, K. (April 1997). "Adventures in the Mainframe Trade: Inverview with Gene Amdahl". IEEE Design & Test of Computers: 5–13.
- Myron Magnet, GENE AMDAHL FIGHTS TO SALVAGE A WRECK / Fortune Magazine article on Trilogy's history, September 1, 1986