Pyramid Technology

~ the eulogy ~

A group of engineers left Hewlett-Packard in 1981 to build a serious minicomputer on RISC principles, and the machine they announced in August 1983 was the Pyramid 90x. It was marketed as RISC and was actually microprogrammed, with a custom 32 bit scalar processor at 8 MHz and a sliding register window borrowed from the Berkeley work: 64 registers visible to a program, 48 of them being the top of the subroutine stack, so a call moved the window up 32 words and the caller's outgoing parameters became the callee's incoming ones without anybody copying anything.

It benchmarked at roughly twice a VAX-11/780 and sold for about half the price, and the second half of that sentence was doing as much work as the first. Digital did not want to sell a VAX without VMS, and charged accordingly, while every university computing department in the world wanted Unix. Pyramid also had a small piece of hardware that made its numbers look better than the architecture alone deserved. Its terminal controller was a bit-slice processor driving sixteen serial ports over DMA from chained output blocks, so interactive users cost the main CPU almost nothing, where a VAX needed the processor's attention every few bytes. On any benchmark with a realistic number of people logged in, Pyramid pulled away.

The machines got bigger through the decade. The 98x pushed the clock to 10 MHz and became the company's first symmetric multiprocessor in 1986, reaching about 25 MIPS with four processors by 1987. The MIServer line arrived in 1989, moved to MIPS R3000s, and in its largest configuration carried 24 processors under DC/OSx, a port of System V Release 4. The Nile series of late 1993 went 64 bit on the R4400 at 150 MHz, up to sixteen processors, 92 MIPS each. Along the way AT&T signed on to remarket the line in 1989 and ICL licensed the multiprocessor bus in 1993. Siemens Nixdorf, already a shareholder, announced on 23 January 1995 that it would tender for the rest at 16 dollars a share, valuing the company at about 207 million dollars, and the deal closed that March.

~ the dossier ~

~ both universes ~

The feature worth remembering is OSx. Unix in the 1980s had split into a Berkeley lineage and an AT&T System V lineage that disagreed about system calls, signals, terminal handling and file system layout, and software written against one of them needed real work to run on the other. Committing a department to a machine meant committing it to a side. Pyramid shipped a dual-universe Unix where both environments were present at once and a binary from either world ran as it was. It was also, by 1985, only the second company to ship a multiprocessor Unix at all.

That argument was settled before I ever touched a Unix machine. Linux was already the answer by the time I was a student in the 2000s, and what reached me was the residue: two spellings of the same command that both still work, and manual pages that quietly tell you which tradition a given flag came out of. I inherited the split as trivia. In 1985 it was a purchasing decision, and Pyramid built a processor and an operating system to sell into it.

~ the mesh that arrived too late ~

The last machine Pyramid built was the Reliant RM1000, known inside the company as the Meshine. It was a massively parallel design with one MIPS R10000 per compute node, arranged in a two-axis mesh, each node running its own copy of Reliant UNIX and controlling twelve SCSI disks between a primary and a secondary controller. The frames locked together and stacked two high, and four of them together were called a ton, so systems were described by how many tons they were. The biggest one built at Pyramid was a 214 processor test rig.

It was coming to market exactly when Siemens bought the company, and Siemens discontinued it without a replacement. That left customers who had bought a lot of it stranded. At least one large British telecommunications company took years to find anything else with comparable input and output capacity, which is the quiet cost of an acquisition that nobody puts in the press release.

~ under german ownership ~

The Pyramid name went into Siemens Computer Systems US and stopped being a brand anybody sold. The technology had a longer afterlife than the name did. Reliant UNIX carried on, and ICF, the software Pyramid wrote to manage the cluster interconnects on the RM1000, became the foundation of the PrimeCluster high availability product that Fujitsu kept developing long afterward.

The corporate wrapper kept changing shape around it. The unit was split in 1998 with the services half becoming Wincor Nixdorf, and the following year Siemens and Fujitsu merged their computer businesses into Fujitsu Siemens Computers, with Amdahl folded in during 2000.

What the 90x had going for it in 1983 was that it ran the operating system customers wanted on hardware that beat the incumbent on price. Fourteen years later the same sentence described a rack of PCs running Linux, and no company organized around selling a proprietary processor to Unix buyers survived that.

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