Modeled after the "Dead Poets Soci

ety," which was actually an appreciation group for classical

rhymesters, the Dead Com

puters 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 Sa

nta 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 pa

st. 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. Ther

e 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-lin

e and T-series

Unisys ISP

Intel 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

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