History
As the company scaled up quickly to enter production, they moved in the late 1980s to Waltham, Massachusetts, 170 Tracer Lane in Waltham, Massachusetts.
KSR refocused its efforts from the scientific to the commercial marketplace, with emphasis on parallel relational databases and OLTP operations. It then got out of the hardware business, but continued to market some of its data warehousing and analysis software products.
The first KSR1 system was installed in 1991. With new processor hardware, new memory hardware and a novel memory architecture, a new compiler port, a new port of a relatively new operating system, and exposed memory hazards, early systems were noted for frequent system crashes. KSR called their cache-only memory architecture (COMA) by the trade name Allcache; reliability problems with early systems earned it the nickname Allcrash, although memory was not necessarily the root cause of crashes. A few KSR1 models were sold, and as the KSR2 was being rolled out, the company collapsed amid accounting irregularities involving the overstatement of revenue.
KSR used a proprietary processor because 64-bit processors were not commercially available. However, this put the small company in the difficult position of doing both processor design and system design. The KSR processors were introduced in 1991 at 20 MHz and 40 MFlops. At that time, the 32-bit Intel 80486 ran at 50 MHz and 50 MFlops. When the 64-bit DEC Alpha was introduced in 1992, it ran at up to 192 MHz and 192 MFlops, while the 1992 KSR2 ran at 40 MHz and 80 MFlops.
One customer of the KSR2, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a United States Department of Energy facility, purchased an enormous number of spare parts, and kept their machines running for years after the demise of KSR.
KSR, along with many of its competitors (see below) went bankrupt during the collapse of the supercomputer market in the early-1990s. KSR went out of business in February 1994 when their stock was delisted from the stock exchange.
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—Imre Lakatos (1922–1974)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
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