11 Facts About Amdahl Corporation

Amdahl Corporation was an information technology company which specialized in IBM mainframe-compatible computer products, some of which were regarded as supercomputers competing with those from Cray Research.

From its first machine in 1975, Amdahl Corporation's business was to provide mainframe computers that were plug-compatible with contemporary IBM mainframes, but offering higher reliability, running somewhat faster, and costing somewhat less.

Gene Amdahl Corporation was committed to expanding the capabilities of the uniprocessor mainframe during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Amdahl Corporation engineers, working with Fujitsu circuit designers, developed unique, air-cooled chips which were based on high-speed emitter-coupled logic circuit macros.

Amdahl Corporation pioneered a variable-speed feature - the '470 accelerator' - on the V5 and V7 systems that allowed the customer to run the CPUs at the higher level of performance of the V6 and V8 systems, respectively, when desired.

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Some at Amdahl Corporation thought this feature would anger customers, but it became quite popular as customer management could now control expenses while still having greater performance available when necessary.

Gene Amdahl Corporation left the company he founded in August 1979 to start Trilogy Systems.

Along the way, Amdahl Corporation came to believe that its best bet at competing with IBM head-to-head was to "bulk up, " in particular, executing a merger with a well-known vendor in the enterprise storage space.

Amdahl Corporation first attempted a merger with one of the largest of these vendors, Memorex, in 1979.

Amdahl Corporation perhaps enjoyed its best success during IBM's transition from bipolar to CMOS technology in the early to mid-1990s.

Amdahl Corporation failed in its effort to introduce its ObjectStar software during this period and the product later became the object of a successful management buyout.