12 Nov
2009
12 Nov
'09
6:17 p.m.
On 12 Nov 2009 at 19:10, William Donzelli wrote:
Will, I think it's the wrong "GR", but an interesting story. From
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/arch/risc/
"Sidenote: Saul Dinman explained in 2003 that GRI was originally
General Research Corporation, a private Massachussetts company; when
it went public, it had name conflicts with a pre-existing General
Research, and then with General Radio as it hunted for a non-
conflicting name. Under the name GRI, the company was eventually
acquired by venture capitalists in North Carolina, and then by a
display manufacturer that wanted to buy their OEM supplier, and
finally by Analog Devices. The GRI processor architecture was one of
the first bus-oriented architectures built using a printed-circuit
backplane. Thousands of GRI-909 systems were sold on an OEM basis,
mostly in the industrial control sector. Had marketing and
capitalization worked out differently, the GRI-909 might have been an
effective competitor for the Data General Nova, another DEC spinoff."
So I guess that any remnants of GRI might be in AD's archives...
Cheers,
Chuck
GRI--Newton,
Mass--I thought, was a firm not affiliated with anyone.
The advert in an old Datamation has the fine print "part of GR
Industries".
GenRad at the time was an almost sunken ship (there is such a thing as
being too conservative in the test equipment market!), and I have to
think it was a mad attempt to bail out the water.