Modeled after the "Dead Poets Society," which was actually an appreciation group for classical
rhymesters, the Dead Computers Society is an appreciation group for computer architectures that no
longer exist. It started as an informal discussion panel at the 1991 ASPLOS ("Architecture Support for
Programming Languages and OS's") conference in Santa Clara, California. A group of friends and
colleagues attending the conference noticed that many of them had worked on systems that were now
discontinued.
They decided to make light of this by forming the Dead Computers Society and holding an open
forum round table on the issues involved. The hope was that an intelligent retrospective would allow
future designers to learn from the lessons of the past. Membership of the Dead Computers Society is
open to anyone who has helped design, build, or program a computer system that no longer exists,
ideally for a company that no longer exists. There are a lot of these; a partial list is shown in Table 11-3.
Table 11-3. Dead Computers
The Dead Computers Honor Roll
American Supercomputer Inc. Intel iPSC/1
Ametek/Symult Intel iPSC/2
Astronautics Intel/Siemens BiiN
Burroughs BSP Masscomp/Concurrent
CDC 7600, Cyberplus Multiflow
CHoPP Myrias
Culler Scientific Niche
Cydrome Prisma
Denelcor SCS
Elxsi SSI
Evans & Sutherland CD Star Technologies
ETA/CDC Supertek
FLEX (Flexible Computer) Suprenum/Siemens
Goodyear Aerospace/Loral DataFlow Systems Texas Instruments ASC
Guiltech/SAXPY Topologix
Floating Point Systems AP-line and T-series Unisys ISPIntel 432
On the other hand, membership is also open to anyone who just thinks it's a kind of neat idea. At the
inaugural meeting, there were over 350 attendees.
The panel moderator tried to draw the members out on the "one single thing that, more than anything
else, was responsible for your dead computer." The Elxsi designer said that they had tried to push the
technology too much and used ECL (emitter-coupled logic) before it was ready for prime time.
However, the chief architect from Multiflow, which went down the tubes around the same time as
Elxsi, felt that their decision not to use ECL was one of several factors that ultimately caused
Multiflow's demise!
About the only consensus was that management and market conditions were responsible for many,
many more bankruptcies than were technical failures. This is understandable; companies that don't