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Encore Computer was an early pioneer in the parallel computing
Parallel computing

Parallel computing is a form of computing in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved Concurrency ....
 market, based in Marlborough, Massachusetts
Marlborough, Massachusetts

Marlborough is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 36,255 at the 2000 census. The name of this town is sometimes spelled as Marlboro, rather than Marlborough, which is the official spelling....
. Although offering a number of system designs beginning in 1985, they were never as well known as other companies in this field such as Pyramid Technology
Pyramid Technology

Pyramid Technology was a computer company that produced a number of RISC-based minicomputers at the upper end of the performance range. They also became the second company to ship a multiprocessor Unix system , in 1985, which formed the basis of their product line into the early 1990s....
, Alliant
Alliant Computer Systems

Alliant Computer Systems was a computer company that designed and manufactured parallel computing systems. Together with Pyramid Technology and Sequent Computer Systems, Alliant's machines pioneered the symmetric multiprocessing market....
, and the most similar systems Sequent
Sequent Computer Systems

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 Open system , innovating in both hardware and software ....
 and FLEX.

Encore was founded in 1983 by: Kenneth Fisher, former CEO of Prime Computer
Prime Computer

Prime Computer was a Natick, Massachusetts-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. The alternative spellings "PR1ME" and "PR1ME Computer" were used as brand names or logos by the company....
; Gordon Bell
Gordon Bell

C. Gordon Bell is a computer engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation , Bell designed several of their Programmed Data Processor machines and later became Vice President of Engineering, overseeing the development of the VAX....
, an engineering vice president from Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
 responsible for the development of the VAX
VAX

VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs....
; and, Henry Burkhardt III
Henry Burkhardt III

Henry Burkhardt III was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, grew up in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and was schooled there. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and attended Princeton University He began his career as a programmer at Digital Equipment Corporation....
, co-founder of Data General
Data General

Data General was one of the first minicomputer firms from the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation....
 and Kendall Square Research
Kendall Square Research

Kendall Square Research was a supercomputer company headquartered originally in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986, near Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
.






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Encore Computer was an early pioneer in the parallel computing
Parallel computing

Parallel computing is a form of computing in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved Concurrency ....
 market, based in Marlborough, Massachusetts
Marlborough, Massachusetts

Marlborough is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 36,255 at the 2000 census. The name of this town is sometimes spelled as Marlboro, rather than Marlborough, which is the official spelling....
. Although offering a number of system designs beginning in 1985, they were never as well known as other companies in this field such as Pyramid Technology
Pyramid Technology

Pyramid Technology was a computer company that produced a number of RISC-based minicomputers at the upper end of the performance range. They also became the second company to ship a multiprocessor Unix system , in 1985, which formed the basis of their product line into the early 1990s....
, Alliant
Alliant Computer Systems

Alliant Computer Systems was a computer company that designed and manufactured parallel computing systems. Together with Pyramid Technology and Sequent Computer Systems, Alliant's machines pioneered the symmetric multiprocessing market....
, and the most similar systems Sequent
Sequent Computer Systems

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 Open system , innovating in both hardware and software ....
 and FLEX.

Encore was founded in 1983 by: Kenneth Fisher, former CEO of Prime Computer
Prime Computer

Prime Computer was a Natick, Massachusetts-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. The alternative spellings "PR1ME" and "PR1ME Computer" were used as brand names or logos by the company....
; Gordon Bell
Gordon Bell

C. Gordon Bell is a computer engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation , Bell designed several of their Programmed Data Processor machines and later became Vice President of Engineering, overseeing the development of the VAX....
, an engineering vice president from Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
 responsible for the development of the VAX
VAX

VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs....
; and, Henry Burkhardt III
Henry Burkhardt III

Henry Burkhardt III was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, grew up in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and was schooled there. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and attended Princeton University He began his career as a programmer at Digital Equipment Corporation....
, co-founder of Data General
Data General

Data General was one of the first minicomputer firms from the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation....
 and Kendall Square Research
Kendall Square Research

Kendall Square Research was a supercomputer company headquartered originally in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986, near Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
. Their goal was to build massively parallel
Massively parallel

Massively parallel is a description which appears in computer science, life science, medical diagnostics, and other fields.A massively parallel computer is a distributed memory computer system which consists of many individual nodes, each of which is essentially an independent computer in itself, and in turn consists of at least one...
 machines from commodity processors; their first design, the Multimax, was released late in 1985. This was one of the first commercial designs to make use of bus snooping, allowing many processors to share the same memory efficiently. The Multimax could support from 1 to 20 30MHz National Semiconductor
National Semiconductor

National Semiconductor is a semiconductor manufacturer, specializing in analog devices and subsystems,headquartered in Santa Clara, California, California, United States....
 NS32032 processors, a 32-bit
32-bit

The range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4,294,967,295 or -2,147,483,648 through 2,147,483,647 using two's complement encoding....
 CISC
Complex instruction set computer

A complex instruction set computer is a computer instruction set architecture in which each instruction can execute several low-level operations, such as a load from Memory , an arithmetic operator, and a memory , all in a single instruction....
 design similar to that of the Motorola 68000
Motorola 68000

The Motorola 68000 is a 16/32-bit Complex instruction set computer microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor ....
. A 50 MHz speed-bumped version of the NS32032 led to the Multimax 500 in 1989, which was otherwise identical. Both machines ran a version of Unix
Unix

Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of American Telephone & Telegraph employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna....
 modified for parallel computing. However, soon after the 500's release, National stopped development of the NS32032 design.

In 1988 Encore purchased the former Systems Engineering Laboratories
Systems Engineering Laboratories

Systems Engineering e, Florida]]. It was one of the first 32-bit realtime computer system manufacturers. Realtime computers are used for process control and monitoring; to accommodate these applications, they must include architectural features allowing them to respond quickly to external stimuli such as switch closures in a power plant....
 (SEL) from Nippon Mining. SEL, founded in 1961, built high-performance electronics systems for industrial monitoring and control purposes, and was purchased by Gould Electronics
Gould Electronics

Gould Electronics Inc. -- founded in 1884 and based in Chandler, Arizona -- is a company involved in the electronics and semiconductor industries....
 in 1980; Gould was in turn purchased by Nippon Mining in 1988. Because of US Government regulations which forbid foreign companies from owning control of companies providing key components of the national defense (SEL computers were used in many military flight simulators) Nippon had to sell the computer division. Nippon in essence paid Encore to buy the computer division.

Encore then turned, as did most of the market, to RISC-based CPUs. Like Pyramid, they chose the Motorola 88000
Motorola 88000

The 88000 is a microprocessor design produced by Motorola. The 88000 was Motorola's attempt at a home-grown RISC architecture, started in the 1980s....
, and released the Encore-91 in late 1991, supporting two (9102) or four (9104) CPUs running at 25MHz. A bottom-up redesign for the new processor led to the Infinity 90 series, starting with the Infinity 90/ES in 1994. The ES supported between 2 and 2,045 Motorola 88110 CPUs running at 50MHz. Several newer machines in the Infinity 90 series were released, but Encore again found its CPU supplier changing direction as Motorola dropped development of the 88000 series in order to concentrate on the PowerPC
PowerPC

PowerPC is a RISC instruction set architecture created by the 1991 Apple Inc.?IBM?Motorola alliance, known as AIM alliance. Originally intended for personal computers, PowerPC CPUs have since become popular embedded system and high-performance processors....
.

Trying again, this time in the high-performance real-time market, Encore turned to the DEC Alpha
DEC Alpha

Alpha, originally known as Alpha AXP, was a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation , designed to replace the 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computer ISA and its implementations....
 design to create the Infinity R/T series, which first shipped in late 1994. By this point the massively-parallel market was being encroached on by machines made up of large numbers of commodity machines, and Encore released a single-CPU workstation
Workstation

A workstation is a high-end microcomputer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems....
 running OSF/1, the Series 90 RT 3000. It was intended to be used either standalone, or as a node in a massively-parallel machine.

Encore also worked on a modified RISC design known as the RSX. This was intended to operate in two modes, one as a normal CPU node for clusters, and in a CONCEPT/32 compatibility mode, which emulated earlier custom hardware from the realtime side of the company. Encore continues to offer upgrade paths for their earlier systems, some of which date back to 1975.

Parts of the computing side of the company were sold off over the years, with the last major spin-off being their Storage Products Group, sold to Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. is a multinational corporation vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982....
 in 1997. This left the company consisting primarily of their real-time group, the original SEL core, and returned to this business niche after renaming themselves Encore Real Time Computing.

In 2002, Compro Computer Services, Inc. acquired Encore Real Time Computing, although most of the non-US offices still operate under the Encore name. Compro continues its support of SelBUS-based Encore Real Time Computing products, and offers an upgrade path with the Legacy Computer Replacement System (LCRS) hardware simulator.

A sample Encore Multimax system donated from the Naval Postgraduate School
Naval Postgraduate School

The Naval Postgraduate School is an accredited research university operated by the United States Navy. Located in Monterey, California, it grants both master's degree and Doctor of Philosophy....
 is in storage at the Computer History Museum
Computer History Museum

The Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, when The Computer Museum, Boston sent the majority of its historical collection to Moffett Federal Airfield, so that TCM could concentrate on computing-related exhibits for children....
.

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