Beautiful Teams

Rewiring

Throughout the 1980s, requirements rose while competition intensified in our segment of the engineering field, which can broadly be called scientific data processing. As hardware got faster, generic workstations became better at meeting customer requirements without need for the clever tricks we used at Edom Engineering to achieve maximum performance. Meanwhile, the standard libraries and advanced features of Unix operating systems grew to the point where even our crack programming staff couldn't reproduce everything customers expected.

Our core scientific and engineering market was also shrinking because of an unrelated external factor: the U.S. military in the 1980s reduced the research funding upon which many of our customers depended.

It was in the late 1980s when Edom Engineering managers decided on a leap that they hoped would establish a new beachhead in advanced computing. Throughout its existence, we had been happy basing our systems on Motorola chips. But the new wave of Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) processors promised much better performance. The sages among our hardware engineering staff checked out these processors and selected one that they said could deliver the performance we needed.

The impetus behind RISC processors was the increasingly multilayered decision-making required within conventional chips from Intel and Motorola, which computer scientists now categorized with the demeaning term Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC). Conventional ...