Реферат: Gene Amdahl Essay Research Paper

With the success of Amdahl Corporation, Amdahl had no trouble interesting

investors in this new company and easily raised $230 million in start-up

money. Again, his plan was to compete with IBM, and also Amdahl Corporation,

in the high-end mainframe computer market. In addition, Amdahl planned

to completely redesign the semiconductor chips that powered the computers.

His dream was to combine the functions of 100 separate chips onto one

superchip that would work faster and more efficiently than the multiple

chips.

Trilogy’s Misfortune

Unfortunately, Trilogy was hounded by disasters. Torrential rains delayed

construction of the chip plant, then invaded the air conditioning, destroying

the clean room atmosphere and all the chips currently being created. At

that point, Amdahl had spent one-third of the start-up money with nothing

to show for it. To save Trilogy, Amdahl spent the remainder of the money

to acquire Elxsi Corporation, a computer manufacturer, in 1985. The new

company continued to flounder and never achieved great success. In 1989,

Amdahl stepped down as chairman of Elxsi to devote more time to his next

venture.

In 1987, Amdahl founded his third company, this one called Andor Systems

after the "and" and "or" logic gates of computer circuitry.

This time his aim was to build computers that would compete with IBM’s

smaller mainframes. Industry analysts uniformly gave the company very

little chance of success. But Amdahl felt he had an edge — he could make

small mainframe computers more cheaply than IBM. He could use new technology

that allowed him to pack the computer’s central processor onto one

board, rather than the several used by IBM, and he redesigned the compiler

to work more quickly and efficiently. These innovations allowed Andor’s

computers to take up less space and generate less heat, a distinct advantage

to customers who no longer would need giant air-conditioned rooms in which