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Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| Sequent Computer Systems | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Industry | High-end computer hardware |
| Founded | 1983 |
| Defunct | 1999 |
| Fate | Acquired |
| Successor | IBM |
| Website | sequent.com at the Wayback Machine (archived 1998-02-03) |
Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. was a computer company that designed and manufactured multiprocessing computer systems. They were among the pioneers in high-performance symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) open systems, innovating in both hardware (e.g., cache management and interrupt handling) and software (e.g., read-copy-update).
Through a partnership with Oracle Corporation, Sequent became a dominant high-end UNIX platform in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Later it introduced a next-generation high-end platform for UNIX and Windows NT based on a non-uniform memory access architecture, NUMA-Q. As hardware prices fell in the late 1990s, and Intel shifted its server focus to the Itanium processor family, Sequent joined the Project Monterey effort in October 1998, which aimed to move a standard Unix to several new platforms.[1]
In July 1999 Sequent agreed to be acquired by IBM.[2] At the time, Sequent's CEO said its technology would "find its way through IBM's entire product field"[1] and IBM announced it would "both sell Sequent machines, and fold Sequent's technology...into its own servers",[2] but by May 2002 a decline in sales of the models acquired from Sequent, among other reasons, led to the retirement of Sequent-heritage products.[3]
Vestiges of Sequent's innovations live on in the form of data clustering software from PolyServe (subsequently acquired by HP),[4][5] various projects within OSDL, IBM contributions to the Linux kernel, and claims in the SCO v. IBM lawsuit.[6][7][8][9][10]
Originally named Sequel,[11] Sequent was formed in 1983[12] when a group of seventeen engineers and executives left Intel after the failed iAPX 432 "mainframe on a chip" project was cancelled; they were joined by one non-Intel employee. They started Sequent to develop a line of SMP computers,[13] then considered one of the up-and-coming fields in computer design.[14][15][16]
Sequent's first computer systems were the Balance 8000 (released in 1984) and Balance 21000 (released in 1986).[17] Both models were based on 10 MHz National Semiconductor NS32032 processors, each with a small write-through cache connected to a common memory to form a shared memory system. The Balance 8000 supported up to 6 dual-processor boards for a total maximum of 12 processors.[18][19][20] The Balance 21000 supported up to 15 dual-processor boards for a total maximum of 30 processors.[20][21]
The systems ran a modified version of 4.2BSD Unix the company called DYNIX, for DYNamic unIX. The machines were designed to compete with the DEC VAX-11/780, with all of their inexpensive processors available to run any process. In addition the system included a series of libraries that could be used by programmers to develop applications that could use more than one processor at a time.
Their next series was the Intel 80386-based Symmetry, released in 1987. Various models supported between 2 and 30 processors, using a new copy-back cache and a wider 64-bit memory bus. 1991's Symmetry 2000 models added multiple SCSI boards, and were offered in versions with from one to six Intel 80486 processors. The next year it added the VMEbus based Symmetry 2000/x50 with faster CPUs.
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw big changes on the software side for Sequent. DYNIX was replaced by DYNIX/ptx, which was based on a merger of AT&T Corporation's UNIX System V and 4.2BSD. And this was during a period when Sequent's high-end systems became particularly successful due to a close working relationship with Oracle, specifically its high-end database servers. In 1993, it added the Symmetry 2000/x90 along with its ptx/Cluster software, which added various high availability features and introduced custom support for Oracle Parallel Server.
In 1994, Sequent introduced the Symmetry 5000 series models SE20, SE60 and SE90, which used 66 MHz Pentium CPUs in systems from 2 to 30 processors.[12] The next year they expanded that with the SE30/70/100 lineup using 100 MHz Pentiums,[12] and then in 1996 with the SE40/80/120 with 166 MHz Pentiums. A variant of the Symmetry 5000, the WinServer 5000 series, ran Windows NT instead of DYNIX/ptx.[22]
Recognizing the increase in competition for SMP systems after having been early adopters of the architecture, and the increasing integration of SMP technology into microprocessors, Sequent sought its next source of differentiation. They began investing in the development of a system based on a cache-coherent non-uniform memory architecture (ccNUMA) and leveraging Scalable Coherent Interconnect. NUMA distributes memory among the processors, avoiding the bottleneck that occurs with a single monolithic memory. Using NUMA would allow its multiprocessor machines to generally outperform SMP systems, at least when the tasks can be executed close to their memory — as is the case for servers, where tasks typically do not share large amounts of data.
In 1996, it released the first of a new series of machines based on this new architecture. Known internally as STiNG, an abbreviation for Sequent: The Next Generation (with Intel inside), it was productized as NUMA-Q[23] and was the last of the systems released before the company was purchased by IBM for over $800 million.
IBM then started Project Monterey with Santa Cruz Operation, intending to produce a NUMA-capable standardized Unix running on IA-32, IA-64 and POWER and PowerPC platforms. This project later fell through as both IBM and SCO turned to the Linux market, but is the basis for "the new SCO"'s SCO v. IBM Linux lawsuit.
With its future product strategy in tatters, it appeared Sequent had little future standing alone, and was purchased by IBM in 1999 for $810 million.[24] IBM released several x86 servers with a NUMA architecture. The first was the x440 in August, 2002 with a follow-on x445 in 2003. In 2004, an Itanium-based x455 was added to the NUMA family. During this period, NUMA technology became the basis for IBM's extended X-Architecture (eXA, which could also stand for enterprise X-Architecture). As of 2011, this chipset is now on its fifth generation, known as eX5 technology.[25][26] It now falls under the brand IBM System x.
According to a May 30, 2002 article in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) entitled "Sequent Deal Serves Hard Lesson for IBM":
The following is a more detailed description[27] of the first two generations of Symmetry products, released between 1987 and 1990.
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{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)
Media related to Sequent Computer Systems at Wikimedia Commons
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. was a computer company that designed and manufactured multiprocessing computer systems. They were among the pioneers in high-performance symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) open systems, innovating in both hardware (e.g., cache management and interrupt handling) and software (e.g., read-copy-update). Through a partnership with Oracle Corporation, Sequent became a dominant high-end UNIX platform in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Later it introduced a next-generation high-end platform for UNIX and Windows NT based on a non-uniform memory access architecture, NUMA-Q. As hardware prices fell in the late 1990s, and Intel shifted its server focus to the Itanium processor family, Sequent joined the Project Monterey effort in October 1998, which aimed to move a standard Unix to several new platforms. In July 1999 Sequent agreed to be acquired by IBM. At the time, Sequent's CEO said its technology would "find its way through IBM's entire product field" and IBM announced it would "both sell Sequent machines, and fold Sequent's technology...into its own servers", but by May 2002 a decline in sales of the models acquired from Sequent, among other reasons, led to the retirement of Sequent-heritage products. Vestiges of Sequent's innovations live on in the form of data clustering software from PolyServe (subsequently acquired by HP), various projects within OSDL, IBM contributions to the Linux kernel, and claims in the SCO v. IBM lawsuit.
The Free Standards Group was an industry non-profit consortium chartered to primarily specify and drive the adoption of open source standards, founded on May 8, 2000. All standards developed by the Free Standards Group (FSG) were released under open terms (the GNU Free Documentation License with no cover texts or invariant sections) and test suites, sample implementations and other software were released as free software. On January 22, 2007, the Free Standards Group and the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) merged to form The Linux Foundation, narrowing their focus to promoting Linux in competition with Microsoft Windows.
Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) was a non-profit organization supported by a consortium to promote Linux for enterprise computing. Founded in 2000, OSDL positioned itself as an independent, non-profit lab for developers who are adding enterprise capabilities to Linux. The headquarters was first incorporated in San Francisco but later relocated to Beaverton in Oregon with second facility in Yokohama, Japan. On January 22, 2007, OSDL and the Free Standards Group merged to form the Linux Foundation, narrowing their respective focuses to that of promoting Linux.
Arthur Tyde is an American software entrepreneur and private investigator based in San Francisco and SE Asia. He has been an advocate for Open-source software since founding the first Linux Users Group in the San Francisco / Silicon Valley Area. (BALUG). He graduated from Michigan State University with a BA in Telecommunications and Anthropology and was the author of many shoot-em-up style games for Atari consoles, the Commodore 64 and TI-99/4A home computers. Following graduation he jumped freight trains covering most of North America and Canada with Steven 'Bo' Keeley, famous maverick hobo adventurer and speculator. Tyde settled in San Francisco, California where he started his West Coast career as the Information Systems Director for the Law Offices of Melvin Belli in 1988. He was part of the team that worked on the landmark Exxon and Dow Corning lawsuits. Three years later he teamed up with Melvin Belli's chief investigator to start a boutique detective agency specializing in high tech competitive issues and due diligence for mergers and acquisitions. He had a significant impact on the computing industry as the original CEO and co-founder of Linuxcare where he recruited some of the most talented developers in open-source software. Linuxcare was the first company to offer commercial / enterprise class support for Linux and open-source software and supported 21 different Linux distributions on nine hardware architectures. Linuxcare held the Dell support contract for Red Hat Linux for many years, negotiating a deal with Dell that effectively substituted the Windows license SKU for a support contract with Linuxcare. In addition, Tyde is credited, through Linuxcare, as the founding sponsor of the Linux Professional Institute, the Free Standards Group, and one of the first platinum members of the OSDL (now the Linux Foundation - where Tyde served as Chief Technology Officer from 2005-2006). Linuxcare was intended to become publicly traded in 2001, led by Credit Suisse First Boston, but market circumstances and the termination of the companies CEO ultimately ended its ambition to go public. Tyde affiliated with Techzecs LLC as a principal in 2007. Recently, he has led Oracle Corp's Asia Pacific (ASEAN) based Cloud Computing business development practice, served as a consulting Enterprise Architect to Oracle's key customer accounts, and advised APAC based start-up companies. Additionally, Tyde lectures on open source strategies for the enterprise, developing effective sovereign innovation programs, computer security, privacy issues, digital currencies and building start-up companies.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Shirley Chisholm, elected in 1968.
