Comment by neilv
21 hours ago
> They were also joined with several engineers in Beaverton, Oregon through these mergers.
They might mean from Floating Point Systems (FPS):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray#Cray_Research_Inc._and_Cr...
> In December 1991, Cray purchased some of the assets of Floating Point Systems, another minisuper vendor that had moved into the file server market with its SPARC-based Model 500 line.[15] These symmetric multiprocessing machines scaled up to 64 processors and ran a modified version of the Solaris operating system from Sun Microsystems. Cray set up Cray Research Superservers, Inc. (later the Cray Business Systems Division) to sell this system as the Cray S-MP, later replacing it with the Cray CS6400. In spite of these machines being some of the most powerful available when applied to appropriate workloads, Cray was never very successful in this market, possibly due to it being so foreign to its existing market niche.
Some other candidates for server and HPC expertise there (just outside of Portland proper):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequent_Computer_Systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Supercomputers
(I was very lucky to have mentors and teachers from those places and others in the Silicon Forest, and also got to use the S-MP.)
FPS, which had purchased the assets of Celerity Computing in San Diego (well, La Jolla on Towne Centre Drive) , which was where much of the Sun large-systems development would occur.
Celerity had built RISC superminis out of NCR32K chips, running BSD 4.2, then got bought by FPS, then by Cray, then Sun. The Towne Centre Drive property is now Takeda Pharmaceuticals, IIRC.