Sequent Computer Systems, or Sequent, 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 they 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 their 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, various projects within OSDL, IBM contributions to the Linux kernel, and claims in the SCO v. IBM lawsuit.
Read more about Sequent Computer Systems: History, Detailed Model Descriptions, Culture and Values
Famous quotes containing the words sequent, computer and/or systems:
“Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of SHAKSPEARE’s wit.
The men who lived with him became
Poets, for the air was fame.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The archetype of all humans, their ideal image, is the computer, once it has liberated itself from its creator, man. The computer is the essence of the human being. In the computer, man reaches his completion.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air- conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)