Partners
AT&T-CS also bought OEM systems from Tandem Computers and Pyramid Technology. The Tandem Integrity S2 was renamed the StarServer FT and sold only internally to other AT&T divisions. The Pyramid "System 7000" was a large symmetric multiprocessor, containing 12 CPUs, and saw its first large-scale application at the AT&T Universal Cards credit-card billing center, the first enterprise-scale replacement of mainframes by a UNIX server within AT&T. Both these systems used the MIPS R-series RISC microprocessors. After the WE 32000 microprocessors were canceled, the 3B2 follow-on (codenamed "Phoenix") was also to use a MIPS CPU. The entire MIPS-based product line was to be renamed the System 9000, and to feature "scalavailability" - from normal commercial availability (NCA) choices, to fault-tolerant (FT), to high performance SMP.
The System 9000 strategy was canceled when AT&T's Board of Directors decided to close down AT&T Computer Systems, and buy the NCR Corporation, announced in 1991, and implemented January 1, 1992. NCR management tried to cancel all further development of AT&T-CS systems, though some refused to allow this for a few years, and backlash from AT&T Network Systems (later to be spun off as Lucent Technologies) precipitated a purge of NCR upper management by the AT&T Board. NCR had just developed and suddenly canceled its Motorola 88000-based systems, and then started the NCR 3000 series, developed using Intel x86 microprocessors. The AT&T StarServer E could still beat the comparably equipped NCR 3450 by 11% in the TPC Benchmark B test, and some of the SSE's 7 patented innovations were then adapted and retrofitted into the NCR 3000 design.
NCR was renamed AT&T Global Information Solutions (AT&T-GIS) in 1994, and some of the top NCR management was purged. The Naperville, IL operation provided LifeKeeper Fault Resilient System software (a failover high-availability software cluster product), the Distributed lock manager for Oracle Parallel Server, and the Vistium computer-telephony integrated (CTI) on-line hardware-assisted networked meeting product. Only about 400 employees remained in the Naperville location by the beginning of 1995. In the mid-1980s, there had been something like 30,000 employees associated with AT&T-CS, including marketing, customer support, factories, and development.
In 1994 a high powered team from AT&T Naperville transferred to NCR San Diego in the midst of developing a MicroChannel based four channel SCSI adapter based on a custom ASIC. This host bus adapter went on to great success in NCR and served as a connection point for over a billion dollars worth of peripherals attached to NCR minicomputers and database servers.
On September 20, 1995, Bob Allen, American Telephone & Telegraph Chairman of the Board and CEO, announced the "trivestiture" - the 3-way split of American Telephone & Telegraph into the new service-oriented American Telephone & Telegraph, a newly independent NCR, and the new telecom equipment business which would later be named Lucent Technologies. On December 15, the former AT&T-CS operations were shut down, signaling the end of AT&T's involvement in designing computer systems. 3 AT&T-CS employees went into the new NCR, 25 stayed with AT&T, and the rest (about 200) went to Lucent. Many former AT&T Computer Systems employees have been employed by Schaumburg, IL based Motorola.
Read more about this topic: AT&T Computer Systems
Famous quotes containing the word partners:
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
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