What happened
to Masscomp?
One of the Drexel, Burham, Lambert - leveraged buy-outs of the late 1980 of Milken et
al.
The guppy swallowed a whale. DBL organized a leveraged buy-out of Perkin-Elmer's
computer division to create Concurrent Computer Corp (ticker: CCUR). Masscomp was
actually the surviving legal entity, and actually the surviving technology, but the PE
guys were clueless and they were the surviving management team. Funny part is CCUR still
exists
Clem
Actually, having been there at CCUR at the time, the mess that was caused by the merger
was amazing.
Concurent had been around two years when they merged with (swallowed) Masscomp.
I was told Concurrent thought they could dump the existing manufacturing in Westford --
because they used to build legacy Perkin Elmer 7350 boxes (IIRC). Those were a small
UniPlus system based on the 68000 with no virtual memory paging and a limited number of
options.
They didn't understand the product, the diagnostics or the manufacturing processing.
ECO's were not always documented in the stuff CCUR got. As an old DEC guy, I was at
least familliar with the diagnostic supervisor and stuff. Masscomp was very DEC-like in
the diags. So was Alliant when I was there.
The guys in Masscomp found other jobs. ECO changes never got transfered in the knowledge
transfer.
Training at Conccurrent didn't have much understanding of the hardware. By the time
they got manufacturing up they lost too much time and the PC platform began to be
dominant. I think they were delayed in shipping some models by about a quarter.
The only thing keeping them afloat in the early 90's was the use of OS/32 boxes (old
Perkin Elmer
32xx's) for various military and security uses. Their non-mililtary uses were
aircraft simulators and industrial control stuff. Both of those had VAX boxes as
competitors and the 68k stuff was also moving into that space.
I remember the folks pushing the 32xx iron plugged their fast context switch time vs. DEC.
I seem to remember their high end box when I left in 1988 was the 68030 with the 68040
being new.
When I came back in 1992 they were looking at PowerPC
I kept saying they should port the stuff to x86 and make the RTU a FreeBSD based OS and
get out of the hardware and just to Real-Time Unix software. They didn't see that
they needed someone with cheaper costs doing the assembly and design -- so they could
concentrate on the high end value-add controllers and software.
Embedded stuff kept getting cheaper and smaller and the RTU hardware was expensive.
Harris split their computer division into a defense/security piece and a commercial piece.
Concurrent was the surviving legal entity for the Harris-CCUR merger. Harris was a
big RTU OEM and reseller to the government... I think they even had sources to RTU.
I left for Pyramid Technology traning only to come back when AT&T dropped Pyramid in
the NCR deal and half the Pyramid business went bye-bye. When I tell people I know OS/x
they think OSx.
Masscomp was a good place to learn about dual-universe Unix. When I hit Pyramid I went
to town.
Not only did they do dual libraries -- they did two versions of every command -- the UCB
universe version and the ATT version.
The sick part was the 3 UUCP varients that could be configured to talk to each other like
they were separate machines.
I'd kill to see the sources for dual universe Unix so I could look to see about
implementing a BSD/Linux dual universe clone... I'm mostly a sysadmin -- but I'm
crazy.
A lot of Unix guys tell me how ugly dual universe is -- but I actually liked it.
bill
