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scholia | 6 years ago

> When it launched in 2001...the idea that a massive array of cheap x86 processors will outperform enterprise-class servers simply hadn't occurred to most people yet

The idea was certainly around in the early-to-mid 1980s, when some former Intel engineers founded Sequent.

The Balance 8000, released in 1984, supported up to 12 processors on dual-CPU boards, while the Balance 21000, released in 1986, supported up to 30.

I interviewed the founder, Casey Powell, and he was explicit about multiple Intel microprocessors replacing large systems. He was targeting minicomputers at the time, of course, but we all anticipated that bigger sets of more powerful CPUs would eventually surpass even the biggest "big iron".

Powell was a great guy. However, his company got taken over by IBM. In the end, he didn't get to change the world.

"It's hard to be the little guy on the block and have really great technology and get beaten, just because the other guy is big." https://www.cnet.com/news/sequent-was-overmatched-ceo-says/

discuss

kragen|6 years ago

Right! Some friends of mine spent a lot of time programming a Symmetry in the early 1990s. Also around the same time, 1988, Sun introduced the Sun386i, which could even run multiple MS-DOS programs at once — but it wasn't a huge success, and they stuck with SPARC. I think Sequent and the Sun386i were just too early, say by about six or seven years.

An interesting question is: what are the structural advantages of bigness? When Control Data produced the world's fastest computer, some people at IBM wondered how it could happen that a much smaller company could beat them to the punch that way; others believed that that smallness was precisely the reason.

AnimalMuppet|6 years ago

The advantage of smallness is that you can be faster than the big guys. You also can go into smaller niches.

The advantages of bigness are that you can use scale to make the same thing less expensive, and that you can make at least one mistake without it killing you, and that you can chase more than one "next big things" at once.