Convex Computer

~ the eulogy ~

Convex Computer was started in Richardson, Texas in 1982 by Bob Paluck and Steve Wallach. Wallach had come out of Data General, where he ran advanced development on the MV/8000, which is the machine Tracy Kidder wrote The Soul of a New Machine about. The early prototypes carried the name Parsec. The product idea began from a price. Build a vector machine fast enough to be worth having, and cheap enough that a department head could sign for one without a trip to the board.

The C1 shipped in 1985, a single vector processor peaking around 20 MFLOPS in double precision and running a Unix at a time when most supercomputers ran an operating system nobody had ever seen before. The C2 followed in 1988 with up to four processors on a crossbar, and the C3 in 1991 with up to eight of them, clocked hard enough to push a single CPU to 240 MFLOPS peak. A good share of what customers were paying for was the compiler. The vectorizing Fortran was strong enough that existing code could go in and come out faster without being rewritten, which is the whole difference between a machine you buy and a machine you also budget two years of staff time for.

By the early 1990s the pressure was coming from both sides. Cray sat above with more machine than most sites needed, and RISC workstations were climbing hard from below at a price that made a minisupercomputer look like an odd thing to want. Convex ran two answers at once. The C4 carried the proprietary vector line forward in gallium arsenide, while the Exemplar, announced in 1994, threw out Convex's own processor and built a parallel machine from Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC chips. The Exemplar worked. It also put the company's future on a supplier's roadmap.

~ the dossier ~

~ the machine in between ~

Minisupercomputer was never an architecture, it was a shelf in a catalog. The machines on it did roughly what the big vector iron did and cost roughly what a serious departmental system cost, and the pitch was always the same sentence about getting most of the performance for a small fraction of the money. Convex was the company that made the shelf work commercially. Alliant and Multiflow were on it too and neither lasted the decade.

I have never stood in a room with one of these. It was a category defined by who signs the purchase order, and in Turkey in the 1980s there was nobody writing that order. What eventually reached me was the far end of the same arithmetic. The C1's peak was 20 MFLOPS in double precision in 1985, and the desktop I did university work on two decades later went past that by a margin nobody would bother measuring. Convex spent thirteen years selling the distance between a Cray and a workstation. The distance closed underneath the company.

That is the shape of the whole minisupercomputer collapse and it did not require anybody to make a mistake. Commodity processors got fast on somebody else's volume, and every machine whose reason to exist was sitting between two price points lost its reason. The Exemplar was Convex reading this correctly and acting on it early. Reading it correctly also meant admitting that the valuable part of Convex was now the interconnect and the software rather than the processor, and the company had just made HP its chip supplier.

~ the last vote ~

Convex, Hewlett-Packard and a shell named Gemini Project Corporation signed an Agreement and Plan of Merger on 21 September 1995, at $4.83 a share in a tax-free stock swap worth about $150 million. Convex had around 850 employees worldwide at that point. The stockholders met to approve it on 20 December 1995 at a conference center auditorium in Richardson, a few miles from the building where the C1 had been designed, and what came out the other side was called the Convex Technology Center of Hewlett-Packard. The Exemplar line kept shipping under HP's names for years afterward as the S-Class and X-Class, then folded into the V-Class. Wallach became chief technology officer of HP's large systems group and later collected the Seymour Cray Award, which is the sort of ending that reads as a happy one everywhere except on the letterhead.

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