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111-457: The product was originally developed by Tandem Computers . Tandem was acquired by Compaq in 1997. Compaq was later acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2002. When Hewlett-Packard split in 2015 into HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NonStop SQL and the rest of the NonStop product line went to Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The product primarily is used for online transaction processing and

222-749: A Fortune 500 ranking of 9 in 2009. In November 2009, HP announced its acquisition of 3Com , and closed the deal on April 12, 2010. On April 28, 2010, HP announced its buyout of Palm, Inc. for $ 1.2 billion. On September 2, 2010, HP won its bidding war for 3PAR with a $ 33 a share offer ($ 2.07 billion), which Dell declined to match. On November 1, 2015, Hewlett-Packard was split into two separate companies. Its enterprise products and services business were spun-off to form Hewlett Packard Enterprise , while its personal computer and printer businesses became HP Inc. Bill Hewlett and David Packard graduated with degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1935. The company started in

333-547: A garage in Palo Alto during a fellowship they had with past professor Frederick Terman at Stanford during the Great Depression , whom they considered a mentor in forming the company. In 1938, Packard and Hewlett began part-time work in a rented garage with an initial capital investment of US$ 538 (equivalent to $ 11,645 in 2023). In 1939, Hewlett and Packard decided to formalize their partnership. They tossed

444-643: A Fortune-20 company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average . Fiorina received a larger signing offer than any of her predecessors. The same year, Fiorina articulated a set of " rules of the garage ", an attempt to capture the spirit of the company's founders. In 1997, HP started selling its products in Iran through a European subsidiary and a Dubai -based Middle Eastern distributor, despite U.S. export sanctions prohibiting such deals imposed by Bill Clinton 's 1995 executive orders . The story

555-514: A business campus; a cluster of clusters with a total of 224 CPUs. This allowed further scale-up for taking on the largest mainframe applications. Like the CPU modules within the computers, the Guardian operating system could failover entire task sets to other machines in the network. Worldwide clusters of 4000 CPUs could also be built via conventional long-haul network links. In 1986, Tandem introduced

666-466: A coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard (HP) or Packard-Hewlett. Hewlett and Packard's first financially successful product was a precision audio oscillator known as the HP 200A , which used a small incandescent light bulb (known as a "pilot light") as a temperature dependent resistor in a critical portion of the circuit, and a negative feedback loop to stabilize

777-575: A core engineering team hired away from the HP 3000 division: Mike Green, Jim Katzman, Dave Mackie and Jack Loustaunou. Their business plan called for ultra-reliable systems that never had outages and never lost or corrupted data. These were modular in a new way that was safe from all " single-point failures " yet would be only marginally more expensive than conventional non-fault-tolerant systems. They would be less expensive and support more throughput than some existing ad-hoc toughened systems that used redundant but usually required "hot spares". Each engineer

888-455: A custom operating system which was significantly different from Unix or HP 3000's MPE. It was initially called T/TOS ( Tandem Transactional Operating System ) but soon named Guardian for its ability to protect all data from machine faults and software faults. In contrast to all other commercial operating systems, Guardian was based on message passing as the basic way for all processes to interact, without shared memory, regardless of where

999-611: A definitive agreement to acquire Opsware in a cash tender deal that values the company at $ 14.25 per share, which combined Opsware software with the Oracle enterprise IT management software. In the first few years of Hurd's tenure as CEO, HP's stock price more than doubled. By the end of the 2007 fiscal year, HP reached the $ 100 billion mark for the first time. The company's annual revenue reached $ 104 billion , allowing HP to overtake competitor IBM. On May 13, 2008, HP and Electronic Data Systems (EDS) announced that they had signed

1110-593: A definitive agreement under which HP would purchase EDS. On June 30, HP announced that the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 had expired. "The transaction still requires EDS stockholder approval and regulatory clearance from the European Commission and other non-U.S. jurisdictions and is subject to the satisfaction or waiver of the other closing conditions specified in

1221-402: A failed part. Their fast clocks could not be synchronized as in strict lock stepping, so voting instead happened at each interrupt. Some other versions of Integrity used 4x "pair and spares" redundancy. Pairs of processors ran in lock-step to check each other. When they disagreed, both processors were marked untrusted, and their workload was taken over by a hot-spare pair of processors whose state

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1332-522: A foreign subsidiary. HP ended its relationship with Redington Gulf after the SEC inquiry. On September 3, 2001, HP announced that an agreement had been reached with Compaq to merge the two companies. On May 3, 2002, after passing a shareholder vote, HP officially announced the merger with Compaq. Prior to this, plans had been in place to consolidate the companies' product teams and product lines. The newly-merged company would officially launch five days after

1443-427: A line of electronic test and measurement equipment. The HP Garage at 367 Addison Avenue is now designated an official California Historical Landmark, and is marked with a plaque calling it the "Birthplace of ' Silicon Valley ' ". The company won its first big contract in 1938 to provide the HP 200B , a variation of its first product, the HP 200A low-distortion frequency oscillator for Walt Disney 's production of

1554-789: A manufacturing plant was established in Böblingen and a marketing organization in Geneva . Packard handed the presidency over to Hewlett when he became chairman in 1964, but remained CEO of the company. HP is recognized as the symbolic founder of Silicon Valley , though it did not actively investigate semiconductor devices until a few years after the " traitorous eight " abandoned William Shockley to create Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. Hewlett-Packard's HP Associates division, established around 1960, developed semiconductor devices primarily for internal use. Instruments and calculators were some of their products using semiconductor devices. During

1665-598: A novel way; the compiler, not the microcode, was responsible for deciding when full registers were spilled to the memory stack and when empty registers were re-filled from the memory stack. On the HP ;3000, this decision took extra microcode cycles in every instruction. The HP 3000 supported COBOL with several instructions for calculating directly on arbitrary-length BCD (binary-coded decimal) strings of digits. The T/16 simplified this to single instructions for converting between BCD strings and 64-bit binary integers. In

1776-498: A pair of CPUs, controllers, or buses, so that the system would keep running without loss of connections if one power supply failed. The careful complex arrangement of parts and connections in customers' larger configurations were documented in a Mackie diagram , named after lead salesman David Mackie, who invented the notation. None of these duplicated parts were wasted "hot spares"; everything added to system throughput during normal operations. Besides recovering well from failed parts,

1887-543: A proprietary magnetic tape for storage. HP computers were similar in capabilities to the much later IBM Personal Computer , though the limitations of available technology forced prices to be high. In 1978, Hewlett stepped down as CEO and was succeeded by John A. Young . HP expanded into South Africa in the 1980s. Activists supporting divestment from South Africa accused HP of "automating apartheid ". Sales reached $ 6.5 billion in 1985 with 85,000 employees. In 1984, HP introduced both inkjet and laser printers for

1998-687: A quarter mile away from the HP offices. Initial venture capital investment in Tandem Computers came from Tom Perkins, who was formerly a general manager of the HP 3000 division. The business plan included detailed ideas for building a unique corporate culture reflecting Treybig's values. The design of the initial Tandem/16 hardware was completed in 1975, and the first system shipped to Citibank in May 1976. The company enjoyed uninterrupted exponential growth through 1983. Inc. magazine ranked Tandem as

2109-737: A range of printers and other imaging products. The company directly marketed its products to households; small- to medium-sized businesses and enterprises, as well as via online distribution; consumer-electronics and office-supply retailers; software partners; and major technology vendors. It also offered services and a consulting business for its products and partner products. In 1999, HP spun off its electronic and bio-analytical test and measurement instruments business into Agilent Technologies ; HP retained focus on its later products, including computers and printers. It merged with Compaq in 2002, and acquired Electronic Data Systems in 2008, which led to combined revenues of $ 118.4 billion that year and

2220-546: A reputation for sturdiness and usability. HP introduced the Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus (HPIB) computer peripheral interface (later cloned by National Instruments as GPIB and standardized by the IEEE as IEEE-488 ) on their relay actuator products in 1973. HPIB was later integrated into most high end test & measurement equipment it produced from 1980 onward. As early as 1977, HP began production of

2331-419: A simple accumulator -based design with two accumulator registers and, in the HP 1000 models, two index registers . The series was produced for 20 years in spite of several attempts to replace it, and was a forerunner of the HP 9800 and HP 250 series of desktop and business computers. At the end of 1968, Packard handed over the duties of CEO to Hewlett to become United States Deputy Secretary of Defense in

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2442-408: A simpler hardware-only memory-centric design where all recovery was done by switching between hot spares. The most successful competitor was Stratus Technologies , whose machines were re-marketed by IBM as "IBM System/88". In such systems, the spare processors do not contribute to system throughput between failures, but merely redundantly execute exactly the same data thread as the active processor at

2553-713: A small number of top-of-stack, 16-bit data registers plus some extra address registers for accessing the memory stack. Both used Huffman encoding of operand address offsets, to fit a large variety of address modes and offset sizes into the 16-bit instruction format with good code density. Both relied heavily on pools of indirect addresses to overcome the short instruction format. Both supported larger 32- and 64-bit operands via multiple ALU cycles, and memory-to-memory string operations. Both used "big-endian" addressing of long versus short memory operands. These features had all been inspired by Burroughs B5500–B6800 mainframe stack machines. The T/16 instruction set changed several features from

2664-572: A stronger foundation than its inherited HP 3000 traits. Rainbow's hardware was a 32-bit register-file machine that aimed to be better than a Digital Equipment Corporation VAX . For reliable programming, the main programming language was "TPL", a subset of Ada . At that time, programmers barely understood how to compile Ada to unoptimized code. There was no migration path for existing NonStop system software coded in TAL. The OS, database and Cobol compilers were entirely redesigned. Customers would see it as

2775-493: A third generation CPU, the NonStop VLX . It had 32-bit data paths, wider microcode, 12 MHz cycle time, and a peak rate of one instruction per cycle. It was built from three boards of ECL gate array chips (with TTL pinout). It had a revised Dynabus with speed raised to 20 MB/s per link, 40 MB/s total. Later, FOX II increased the physical diameter of TNS clusters to 4 kilometers. Tandem's initial database support

2886-538: A totally disjoint product line requiring all-new software from them. The software side of this project took much longer than planned. The hardware was already obsolete and outperformed by TXP before its software was ready, resulting in the Rainbow project being abandoned. All subsequent efforts emphasized upward compatibility and easy migration paths. Development of Rainbow's advanced client/server application development framework called "Crystal" continued awhile longer and

2997-518: A workstation, and software to manage them—OpenView Client Configuration Manager 2.0. In that same year, HP's share price skyrocketed due to consistent results in the last couple quarters of the year with Hurd's plan to cut back HP's workforce and lower costs. HP began its marketing campaign called "The Computer is Personal Again" in May 2006, aimed at bringing back the personal computer as a personal product. The campaign utilized viral marketing and sophisticated visuals, as well as its own website. Some of

3108-423: Is tailored for organizations that need high availability and scalability for their database system. Typical users of the product are stock exchanges, telecommunications, POS, and bank ATM networks. NonStop SQL is designed to run effectively on parallel computers, adding functionality for distributed data, distributed execution, and distributed transactions. First released in 1987, a second version in 1989 added

3219-479: The Apple I computer while working at HP and offered it to them under their right of first refusal to his work. They did not take it up as the company wanted to stay in scientific, business, and industrial markets. Wozniak said that HP "turned him down five times", but that his loyalty to HP made him hesitant to start Apple with Steve Jobs . The company earned global respect for a variety of products. They introduced

3330-539: The HP Pavilion dv1000 series of laptops in 2004, which included the HP Pavilion dv1658 and dv1040 models. Other laptop models available around this time were the dv4000, dv5000, and the dv8000 series. In January 2005, following years of underperformance, which included HP's Compaq merger that fell short and disappointing earning reports, the board asked Fiorina to resign as chair and chief executive officer of

3441-772: The InfiniBand industry standard. All S-Series machines used MIPS processors, including the R4400, R10000 , R12000 , and R14000 . The design of the later, faster MIPS cores was primarily funded by Silicon Graphics Inc . But Intel's sixth generation Pentium Pro overtook the performance of RISC designs and also SGI's graphics business shrunk. After the R10000, there was no investment in significant new MIPS core designs for high-end servers. So Tandem needed to move its NonStop product line to another microprocessor architecture with competitive fast chips. Jimmy Treybig remained CEO of

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3552-724: The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird Mach 3 spy plane. Cyclone's name was supposed to represent its "unstoppable speed in roaring through OLTP workloads". Announcement day was October 17, 1989. That afternoon, the region was struck by the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake , causing freeway collapses in Oakland and major fires in San Francisco . Tandem offices were shaken, but no one was badly hurt on site. In 1980–1983, Tandem attempted to re-design its entire hardware and software stack to put its NonStop methods on

3663-521: The NonStop TXP CPU was the first entirely new implementation of the TNS instruction set architecture. It was built from standard TTL chips and Programmed Array Logic chips, with four boards per CPU module. It had Tandem's first use of cache memory. It had a more direct implementation of 32-bit addressing, but still sent them through 16-bit adders. A wider microcode store allowed a major reduction in

3774-727: The 1940 animated film Fantasia , which allowed Hewlett and Packard to formally establish the Hewlett-Packard Company on July 2, 1939. The company grew into a multinational corporation widely respected for its products. HP was the world's leading PC manufacturer from 2007 until the second quarter of 2013, when Lenovo moved ahead of HP. HP specialized in developing and manufacturing computing, data storage, and networking hardware; designing software; and delivering services. Major product lines included personal computing devices, enterprise and industry standard servers, related storage devices, networking products, software, and

3885-469: The 1960s, HP partnered with Sony and Yokogawa Electric in Japan to develop several high-quality products. The products were not a huge success, as there were high costs involved in building HP-looking products in Japan. In 1963, HP and Yokogawa formed the joint venture Yokogawa-Hewlett-Packard to market HP products in Japan. HP bought Yokogawa Electric's share of Hewlett-Packard Japan in 1999. HP spun off

3996-654: The Apache Trafodion project. In 1987, Tandem introduced the NonStop CLX , a low-cost less-expandable minicomputer system. Its role was for growing the low end of the fault-tolerant market, and for deploying on the remote edges of large Tandem networks. Its initial performance was roughly similar to the TXP; later versions improved to where they were about 20% slower than a VLX. Its small cabinet could be installed into any "copier room" office environment. A CLX CPU

4107-534: The CPU core and shared a single bus and single bank of SRAM . As a result, CLX required at least two machine cycles per instruction. In 1989, Tandem introduced the NonStop Cyclone , a fast but expensive system for the mainframe end of the market. Each self-checking CPU took three boards full of hot-running ECL gate array chips, plus memory boards. Despite being microprogrammed, the CPU was superscalar , often completing two instructions per cache cycle. This

4218-511: The Cyclone/R, also known as CLX/R. This was a low-cost mid-range system based on CLX components but used R3000 microprocessors instead of the much slower CLX stack machine board. To minimize time to market, this machine was initially shipped without any MIPS native-mode software. Everything, including its NonStop Kernel (NSK) operating system (a follow-on to Guardian) and NonStop SQL database, was compiled to TNS stack machine code. That object code

4329-525: The Dynamite to serving primarily as a smart terminal. It was quietly and quickly withdrawn from the market. Tandem's message-based NonStop operating system had advantages for scaling, extreme reliability, and efficiently using expensive "spare" resources. But many potential customers wanted just good-enough reliability in a small system, using a familiar Unix operating system and industry-standard programs. Tandem's various fault-tolerant competitors all adopted

4440-625: The HP 3000 design. The T/16 supported paged virtual memory from the beginning. The HP 3000 series did not add paging until the PA-RISC generation, 10 years later (although via MPE V it had a form of paging using the APL firmware, in 1978). Tandem added support for 32-bit addressing in its second machine; HP 3000 lacked this until its PA-RISC generation. Paging and long addresses were critical for supporting complex system software and large applications. The T/16 treated its top-of-stack registers in

4551-540: The HP856x spectrum analyzers to complement its RF power meters and sensors capable of measuring signals in excess of 20 GHz. HP also produced configurable chassis based sweep generators capable of generating signals to 20 GHz. Other T&M products of the time included lab grade multimeters, microwave frequency counters, RF amplifiers, high accuracy microwave detectors, lab grade power supplies and more. These products were succeeded by modernized versions as well as

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4662-617: The Model 400A vacuum-tube voltmeter during the war. Hewlett and Packard worked on counter-radar technology and artillery shell proximity fuzes during World War II; the work exempted Packard from the draft, but Hewlett had to serve as an officer in the Army Signal Corps after being called to active duty. HP was incorporated on August 18, 1947, with Packard as president. Sales reached $ 5.5 million in 1951 with 215 employees. The company went public on November 6, 1957. In 1959,

4773-504: The Neoview code base were open sourced in 2014 under the name Trafodion , which is now a top-level Apache project. Tandem Computers Tandem Computers, Inc. was the dominant manufacturer of fault-tolerant computer systems for ATM networks, banks , stock exchanges , telephone switching centers, 911 systems, and other similar commercial transaction processing applications requiring maximum uptime and no data loss. The company

4884-535: The NonStop Himalaya S-Series with a new top-level system architecture based on ServerNet connections. ServerNet replaced the Dynabus, FOX, and I/O buses. It was much faster, more general, and could be extended to more than just two-way redundancy via an arbitrary fabric of point-to-point connections. Tandem designed ServerNet for its own needs but then promoted its use by others; it evolved into

4995-497: The T/16 was also designed to detect as many kinds of intermittent failures as possible, as soon as possible. This prompt detection is called "fail fast". The point was to find and isolate corrupted data before it was permanently written into databases and other disk files. In the T/16, error detection was by added custom circuits that added little cost to the total design; no major parts were duplicated to get error detection. The T/16 CPU

5106-453: The T/16, each CPU consisted of two boards of TTL logic and SRAMs , and ran at about 0.7 MIPS . At any instant, it could access only four virtual memory segments (System Data, System Code, User Data, User Code), each limited to 128 KB in size. The 16-bit address spaces were already small for major applications when it shipped. The first release of T/16 had only a single programming language, Transaction Application Language (TAL). This

5217-588: The Year" in 2003, which in turn published a press release stating that "[t]he seeds of the Redington-Hewlett-Packard relationship were sowed six years ago for one market — Iran." At the time, Redington Gulf had only three employees whose sole purpose was to sell HP products to the Iran market. According to former officials who worked on sanctions, HP used a loophole by routing their sales through

5328-401: The ability to run queries in parallel, and the product became fairly famous for being one of the few systems that scales almost linearly with the number of processors in the machine: adding a second CPU to an existing NonStop SQL server almost exactly doubled its performance. The second version added /MP to its name, for Massively Parallel. A third version, NonStop SQL/MX, created a product that

5439-486: The ads featured Pharrell , Petra Nemcova , Mark Burnett , Mark Cuban , Alicia Keys , Jay-Z , Gwen Stefani , and Shaun White . This marketing campaign was also incorporated directly onto HP's product offerings, which included desktops, laptops, and other hardware and software. HP offered three new laptop models in mid-to-late 2006 with the Pavilion dv2000 , dv6000 , and dv9000 series. In July 2007, HP signed

5550-497: The amplitude of the output sinusoidal waveform. This allowed the HP 200A to be sold for $ 89.40 when competitors were selling less stable oscillators for over $ 200 . The 200 series of generators continued production until at least 1972 as the 200AB, still tube-based but improved in design through the years. One of the company's earliest customers was Bud Hawkins, chief sound engineer for Walt Disney Studios , who bought eight HP 200B audio oscillators (at $ 71.50 each) to be used in

5661-472: The animated film Fantasia . HP's profit at the end of 1939, its first full year of business, was $ 1,563 (equivalent to $ 34,236 in 2023) on revenues of $ 5,369 . In 1942, they built their first building at 395 Page Mill Road and were awarded the Army-Navy "E" Award in 1943. HP employed 200 people and produced the audio oscillator, a wave analyzer, distortion analyzers, an audio-signal generator, and

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5772-577: The announcement on May 7, 2002. As Compaq acquired Tandem Computers in 1997 and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1998, HP inherited both acquired companies' product lines, and offered support for the Tandem NonStop family (now owned by Hewlett Packard Enterprise) and DEC products PDP-11 , VAX and Alpha . Both the DEC PDP-11 and VAX were discontinued years before the merger, and HP supported DEC Alpha until April 2007. The merger

5883-550: The case of a hardware or software failure. To contain the scope of failures and of corrupted data, these multi-computer systems have no shared central components, not even main memory. Conventional multi-computer systems all use shared memories and work directly on shared data objects. Instead, NonStop processors cooperate by exchanging messages across a reliable fabric, and software takes periodic snapshots for possible rollback of program memory state. Besides masking failures, this " shared-nothing " messaging system design also scales to

5994-563: The chips must be designed to be fully deterministic. Any hidden internal state must be cleared by the chip's reset mechanism. Otherwise, the matched chips can go out of sync for no visible reason and without any faults, long after the chips are restarted. Chip designers agree that these are good principles because it helps them test chips at manufacturing time. But all new microprocessor chips seemed to have bugs in this area and required months of shared work between MIPS (the third-party manufacturer used by Tandem) and Tandem to eliminate or work around

6105-532: The choice to abdicate its successful PA-RISC product lines in favor of Intel's Itanium microprocessors that HP helped to design. Shortly thereafter, Compaq and HP announced their plan to merge and consolidate their similar product lines. This contentious merger became official in May 2002. The consolidations were painful and destroyed the DEC and "HP Way" engineer-oriented cultures, but the combined company did know how to sell complex systems to enterprises and profit, so it

6216-487: The company he founded until a downturn in 1996. The next CEO was Roel Pieper , who joined the company in 1996 as president and CEO. Re-branding to promote itself as a true Wintel (Windows/Intel) platform was conducted by their in-house brand and creative team led by Ronald May, who later went on to co-found the Silicon Valley Brand Forum in 1999. The concept worked, and shortly thereafter the company

6327-514: The company, and she did on February 9, 2005. After her departure, HP's stock jumped 6.9 percent. Robert Wayman, chief financial officer of HP, served as interim CEO while the board undertook a formal search for a replacement. Mark Hurd of NCR Corporation was hired to take over as CEO and president, effective April 1, 2005. Hurd was the board's top choice given the revival of NCR that took place under his leadership. In 2006, HP unveiled several new products including desktops, enhanced notebooks,

6438-414: The cycles executed per instruction; speed increased to 2.0 MIPS. It used the same rack packaging, controllers, backplane, and buses as before. The Dynabus and I/O buses had been overdesigned in the T/16 so they would work for several generations of upgrades. Up to 14 TXP and NonStop II systems could now be combined via FOX , a long-distance fault-tolerant fibre optic bus for connecting TNS clusters across

6549-477: The decade, HP opened hpshopping.com as an independent subsidiary to sell online, direct to consumers; in 2005, the store was renamed "HP Home & Home Office Store". From 1995 to 1999, Hewlett-Packard were sponsors of the English football team Tottenham Hotspur . In 1999, all of the businesses not related to computers, storage, and imaging were spun off from HP to form Agilent Technologies . Agilent's spin-off

6660-404: The desktop. Along with its scanner product line, the printers have later been developed into successful multifunction products, the most significant being single-unit printer/scanner/copier/fax machines. The print mechanisms in HP's LaserJet line of laser printers depend almost entirely on Canon Inc. 's components (print engines), which in turn use technology developed by Xerox . HP developed

6771-461: The details of this in a semi-portable way. In 1981, all T/16 CPUs were replaced by the NonStop II . Its main difference from the T/16 was support for occasional 32-bit addressing via a user-switchable "extended data segment". This supported the next ten years of growth in software and was an advantage over the T/16 or HP 3000. Visible registers remained 16-bit, and this unplanned addition to

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6882-596: The duplicated parts are commodity single-chip microprocessors. Tandem's products for this market began with the Integrity line in 1989, using MIPS processors and a "NonStop UX" variant of Unix. It was developed in Austin, Texas. In 1991, the Integrity S2 used TMR, Triple Modular Redundancy, where each logical CPU used three MIPS R2000 microprocessors to execute the same data thread, with voting to find and lock out

6993-542: The era, including large mainframes , had mean-time-between-failures (MTBF) on the order of a few days, the NonStop system was designed to failure intervals 100 times longer, with uptimes measured in years. Nevertheless, the NonStop was designed to be price-competitive with conventional systems, with a simple 2-CPU system priced at just over twice that of a competing single-processor mainframe, as opposed to four or more times of other fault-tolerant solutions. The first system

7104-584: The fastest-growing public company in America. By 1996, Tandem was a $ 2.3 billion company employing approximately 8,000 people worldwide. Over 40 years, Tandem's main NonStop product line grew and evolved in an upward-compatible way from the initial T/16 fault-tolerant system, with three major changes to its top-level modular architecture or its programming-level instruction set architecture. Within each series, there have been several major re-implementations as chip technology progressed. While conventional systems of

7215-659: The final subtle bugs. In 1993, Tandem released the NonStop Himalaya K-series with the faster MIPS R4400 , a native mode NSK operating system, and fully expandable Cyclone system components. These were connected by Dynabus, Dynabus+, and the original I/O bus, which by now were all running out of performance headroom. In 1995, the NonStop Kernel was extended with a Unix-like POSIX environment called Open System Services. The original Guardian shell and ABI remained available. In 1997, Tandem introduced

7326-436: The first bit mapped graphics displays that, when combined with the HP 2100 21MX F-Series microcoded Scientific Instruction Set, enabled the first commercial WYSIWYG presentation program , BRUNO , that later became the program HP-Draw on the HP 3000. Although scoffed at in the formative days of computing, HP surpassed IBM as the world's largest technology vendor in terms of sales. HP was identified by Wired magazine as

7437-664: The hardware, firmware, and software to convert data into dots for printing. On March 3, 1986, HP registered the HP.com domain name, making it the ninth Internet .com domain to be registered. In 1987, the Palo Alto garage where Hewlett and Packard started their business was designated as a California Historical Landmark . In the 1990s, HP expanded their computer product line, which initially had been targeted at university, research, and business users, to reach consumers. HP also grew through acquisitions: it bought Apollo Computer in 1989 and Convex Computer in 1995. In 1992, Young

7548-546: The incoming Nixon administration. He resumed the chairmanship in 1972 and served until 1993, but Hewlett remained the CEO. The HP 3000 was an advanced stack-based design for a business computing server, later redesigned with RISC technology. The HP 2640 series of smart and intelligent terminals introduced forms-based interfaces to ASCII terminals, and also introduced screen labeled function keys , now commonly used on gas pumps and bank ATMs. The HP 2640 series included one of

7659-402: The instruction differences, even when debugging at machine code level. These Cyclone/R machines were updated with a faster native-mode NSK operating system in a follow-up release. The R3000 and later microprocessors had only a typical amount of internal error checking, insufficient for Tandem's needs. So, the Cyclone/R ran pairs of R3000 processors in lock step, running the same data thread. This

7770-535: The instruction set required executing many instructions per memory reference compared to most 32-bit minicomputers. All subsequent TNS computers were hampered by this instruction set inefficiency. As the NonStop II lacked wider internal data paths, it had to use additional microcode steps for 32-bit addresses. A NonStop II CPU had three boards, using chips and design similar to the T/16. The NonStop II also replaced core memory with battery-backed DRAM memory. In 1983,

7881-471: The introduction of the scalar and vector network analyzer product lines prior to the business being spun off into Agilent Technologies . The HP 9800 series of technical desktop computers started in 1971 with the 9810A. The HP Series 80 started in 1979 with the 85. Some of these machines used a version of the BASIC programming language , which was available immediately after they were switched on, and used

7992-602: The largest commercial workloads. Each doubling of the total number of processors doubles system throughput, up to the maximum configuration of 4000 processors. In contrast, the performance of conventional multiprocessor systems is limited by the speed of some shared memory, bus, or switch. Adding more than 4–8 processors in that manner gives no further system speedup. NonStop systems have more often been bought to meet scaling requirements than for extreme fault tolerance. They compete against IBM's largest mainframes, despite being built from simpler minicomputer technology. Tandem Computers

8103-516: The master process ran into trouble. This allowed the application to survive failures in any CPU or its associated devices, without data loss. It further allowed recovery from some intermittent-style software failures. Between failures, the monitoring by the slave process added some performance overhead but this was far less than the 100% duplication in other system designs. Some major early applications were directly coded in this checkpoint style, but most instead used various Tandem software layers which hid

8214-457: The merger agreement." The agreement was finalized on August 26, 2008, at $ 13 billion, and it was publicly announced that EDS would be re-branded. The first targeted layoff of 24,600 former EDS workers was announced on September 15, 2008. (The company's 2008 annual report gave the number as 24,700, to be completed by end of 2009. ) This round was factored into purchase price as a $ 19.5 billion liability against goodwill. As of September 23, 2009, EDS

8325-469: The number of nodes added to the system, whereas most databases had performance that plateaued quite quickly, often after just two CPUs. A later version released in 1989 added transactions that could be spread over nodes, a feature that remained unique for some time. NonStop SQL continued to evolve, first as NonStop SQL/MP and then NonStop SQL/MX, which transitioned from Tandem to Compaq to HP. The code remains in use in both HP's NonStop SQL/MP, NonStop SQL/MX and

8436-456: The plants to fabricate the chips. Facing the challenges of this changing marketplace and manufacturing landscape, Tandem partnered with MIPS and adopted its R3000 and successor chipsets and their advanced optimizing compiler. Subsequent NonStop Guardian machines using the MIPS architecture were known to programmers as TNS/R machines and had a variety of marketing names. In 1991, Tandem released

8547-406: The processes were running. This approach easily scaled to multiple-computer clusters and helped isolate corrupted data before it propagated. All file system processes and all transactional application processes were structured as master/slave pairs of processes running in separate CPUs. The slave process periodically took snapshots of the master's memory state and took over the workload if and when

8658-488: The producer of the world's first device to be called a personal computer: the Hewlett-Packard 9100A , introduced in 1968. HP called it a desktop calculator because, as Hewlett said: "If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected by our customers' computer gurus because it didn't look like an IBM . We therefore decided to call it a calculator, and all such nonsense disappeared." An engineering triumph at

8769-403: The same instant, in "lock step". Faults are detected by seeing when the cloned processors' outputs diverged. To detect failures, the system must have two physical processors for each logical, active processor. To also implement automatic failover recovery, the system must have three or four physical processors for each logical processor. The triple or quadruple cost of this sparing is practical when

8880-468: The significance of the alliance and also key letters from the two companies H ewlett- P ackard and Compa q (the latter company being famous for incorporating the letter "Q" on its logo for all of their products). HP then went on to become a major producer in desktop computers , laptops, and servers for many different markets. Mscape was a mobile media gaming platform that could be used to create location-based games originating in 2002. HP released

8991-566: The small company Dynac to specialize in digital equipment. The name was picked so that the HP logo could be turned upside down to be a reflected image of the logo of the new company. Dynac was eventually renamed Dymec and folded back into HP in 1959. HP experimented with using Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) minicomputers with its instruments, but entered the computer market in 1966 with the HP 2100 / HP 1000 series of minicomputers after it decided that it would be easier to build another small design team than deal with DEC. The minicomputers had

9102-440: The time, the logic circuit was produced without any integrated circuits , and the CPU assembly was entirely executed in discrete components. With CRT display, magnetic-card storage, and printer, the price was around $ 5,000. The machine's keyboard was a cross between the keyboard of a scientific calculator and the keyboard of an adding machine. There was no alphabetic keyboard. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak originally designed

9213-609: The world's first handheld scientific electronic calculator in 1972 (the HP-35 ), the first handheld programmable in 1974 (the HP-65 ), the first alphanumeric, programmable, expandable in 1979 (the HP-41 C), and the first symbolic and graphing calculator, the HP-28C . Like their scientific and business calculators, HP oscilloscopes , logic analyzers , and other measurement instruments had

9324-420: Was a proprietary design. It was greatly influenced by the HP 3000 minicomputer. They were both microprogrammed , 16-bit , stack-based machines with segmented, 16-bit virtual addressing. Both were intended to be programmed exclusively in high-level languages, with no use of assembler . Both were initially implemented via standard low-density TTL chips, each holding a 4-bit slice of the 16-bit ALU . Both had

9435-524: Was accomplished by having a separate microcode routine for every common pair of instructions. That fused pair of stack instructions generally accomplished the same work as a single instruction of normal 32-bit minicomputers. Cyclone processors were packaged as sections of four CPUs each, and the sections joined by a fiber optic version of Dynabus. Like Tandem's prior high-end machines, Cyclone cabinets were styled with much angular black to suggest strength and power. Advertising videos directly compared Cyclone to

9546-464: Was acquired by Compaq. Compaq's x86-based server division was an early outside adopter of Tandem's ServerNet/InfiniBand interconnect technology. In 1997, Compaq acquired the Tandem Computers company and NonStop customer base to balance Compaq's heavy focus on personal computers (PCs). In 1998, Compaq also acquired the much larger Digital Equipment Corporation and inherited its DEC Alpha RISC servers with OpenVMS and Tru64 Unix customer bases. Tandem

9657-593: Was already current. In 1995, the Integrity S4000 was the first to use ServerNet (a networked "bus" structure) and moved toward sharing peripherals with the NonStop line. In 1995–1997, Tandem partnered with Microsoft to implement high-availability features and advanced SQL configurations in clusters of commodity Microsoft Windows NT machines. This project was codenamed "Wolfpack" and first shipped as Microsoft Cluster Server in 1997. Microsoft benefited greatly from this partnership; Tandem did not. When Tandem

9768-489: Was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California . HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components, as well as software and related services to consumers, small and medium-sized businesses ( SMBs ), and fairly large companies, including customers in government, health, and education sectors. The company was founded in a one-car garage in Palo Alto by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939, and initially produced

9879-434: Was an efficient machine-dependent systems programming language (for operating systems, compilers, etc.) but could also be used for non-portable applications. It was derived from HP 3000's System Programming Language (SPL). Both had semantics similar to C but a syntax based on Burroughs' ALGOL . Subsequent releases added support for Cobol74, Basic , Fortran , Java , C, C++ , and MUMPS . The Tandem NonStop series ran

9990-526: Was an improvement for the surviving NonStop division and its customers. In some ways, Tandem's journey from HP-inspired start-up to an HP-inspired competitor, then to an HP division was "bringing Tandem back to its original roots", but this was not the same HP. The porting of the NSK-based NonStop product line from MIPS processors to Itanium-based processors was completed and was branded as "HP Integrity NonStop Servers". (This NSK Integrity NonStop

10101-493: Was confident they could quickly pull off their own part of this complex new design but doubted that others' areas could be worked out. The parts of the hardware and software design that did not have to be different were largely based on incremental improvements to the familiar hardware and software designs of the HP 3000. Many subsequent engineers and programmers also came from HP. Tandem headquarters in Cupertino, California, were

10212-459: Was duplicated and had dual connections to both CPUs and devices. Each disk was mirrored, with separate connections to two independent disk controllers. If a disk failed, its data was still available from its mirrored copy. If a CPU, controller or bus failed, the disk was still reachable through alternative CPU, controller, and/or bus. Each disk or network controller was connected to two independent CPUs. Power supplies were each wired to only one side of

10323-447: Was for purposes of data integrity, and not fault-tolerance – fault tolerance was handled by the other mechanisms still in place. It used a variation of lock stepping. The checker processor ran 1 cycle behind the primary processor. This allowed them to share a single copy of external code and data caches without putting excessive pinout load on the system bus and lowering the system clock rate. To successfully run microprocessors in lock step,

10434-420: Was formed in 1974, every computer company designed and built its CPUs from basic circuits , using its own proprietary instruction set, compilers, etc. With each year of semiconductor progress with Moore's Law, more of a CPU's core circuits could fit into single chips and run faster and cheaper as a result. However, it became increasingly expensive for a computer company to design those advanced custom chips or build

10545-717: Was founded by Jimmy Treybig in 1974 in Cupertino, California . It remained independent until 1997, when it became a server division within Compaq . It is now a server division within Hewlett Packard Enterprise , following Hewlett-Packard 's acquisition of Compaq and the split of Hewlett-Packard into HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Tandem's NonStop systems use a number of independent identical processors, redundant storage devices, and redundant controllers to provide automatic high-speed " failover " in

10656-517: Was founded in 1974 by James Treybig . Treybig first saw the market need for fault tolerance in OLTP (online transaction processing) systems while running a marketing team for Hewlett-Packard 's HP 3000 computer division, but HP was not interested in developing for this niche. He then joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and developed the Tandem business plan there. Treybig pulled together

10767-484: Was initially reported by The Boston Globe , and it triggered an inquiry by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). HP responded that products worth US$ 120 million were sold in fiscal year 2008 for distribution via Redington Gulf, a company based in the Netherlands, and that as these sales took place through a foreign subsidiary, HP had not violated sanctions. HP named Redington Gulf "Wholesaler of

10878-441: Was known as HP Enterprise Services (now known as DXC Technology ). On November 11, 2009, 3Com and Hewlett-Packard announced that the latter would be acquiring 3Com for $ 2.7 billion in cash. The acquisition was one of the biggest in size among a series of takeovers and acquisitions by technology giants to push their way to become one-stop shops. Since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2007, tech giants have constantly felt

10989-413: Was more ANSI SQL compliant than its predecessor. NonStop SQL/MX has shipped on the NonStop platform since 2002, and can access tables created by NonStop SQL/MP, although only "Native SQL/MX tables" offer ANSI compliance and many "Oracle-like" enhancements. The HP Neoview business intelligence platform was built using NonStop SQL as its origins. NonStop SQL/MX is HP's only OLTP database product. Parts of

11100-470: Was one board, containing six "compiled silicon" ASIC CMOS chips. The CPU core chip was duplicated and lock stepped for maximal error detection. This added no additional fault tolerance but assured data integrity as each CPU included checking logic that made certain that the results of both CPU chips were identical. Other processors would provide fault tolerance. Pinout was a main limitation of this chip technology. Microcode, cache, and TLB were all external to

11211-482: Was only for hierarchical, non-relational databases via the ENSCRIBE file system. This was extended into a relational database called ENCOMPASS . In 1986 Tandem introduced the first fault-tolerant SQL database, NonStop SQL . Developed totally in-house, NonStop SQL includes a number of features based on Guardian to ensure data validity across nodes. NonStop SQL is known for scaling linearly in performance with

11322-424: Was preceded by a proxy fight in 2001 with numerous large HP shareholders as well as the sons of the co-founders, with Bill Hewlett's son Walter objecting to the merger, only approving it reluctantly. HP's pre-merger ticker symbol was "HWP". After the merger with Compaq, the new ticker symbol became "HPQ", which was announced on May 6, 2002. "HPQ" is a combination of the two previous symbols, "HWP" and "CPQ", to show

11433-405: Was sold to customers needing the utmost reliability. This new checking approach was called NSAA, NonStop Advanced Architecture . As in the earlier migration from stack machines to MIPS microprocessors, all customer software was carried forward without source changes. "Native mode" source code compiled directly to MIPS machine code was simply recompiled for Itanium. Some older "non-native" software

11544-480: Was spun off as the "Ellipse" product of Cooperative Systems Incorporated. In 1985, Tandem attempted to grab a piece of the rapidly growing personal computer market with its introduction of the MS-DOS based Dynamite PC/workstation. Numerous design compromises (including a unique 8086-based hardware platform incompatible with expansion cards of the day and extremely limited compatibility with IBM -based PCs) relegated

11655-687: Was still in TNS stack machine form. These were automatically ported onto Itanium via object code translation techniques. The next endeavor was to move from Itanium to the Intel x86 architecture. It was completed in 2014 with the first systems being made commercially available. The inclusion of the fault-tolerant 4X FDR (Fourteen Data Rate) InfiniBand double-wide switches provided more than 25 times increase in system interconnect capacity. Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company , commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( / ˈ h juː l ɪ t ˈ p æ k ər d / HEW -lit PAK -ərd ) or HP ,

11766-406: Was succeeded by Lewis E. Platt , and in 1993 and Hewlett and Packard stepped down from the board with Platt succeeding Packard as chairman. In 1993, HP acquired Advanced Design System from Pathwave. The ADS suite of RF simulation tools was spun off into Agilent in 1999 along with related T&M business units, all of which were carried forward into the spinoff of Agilent into Keysight. Later in

11877-514: Was the Tandem/16 or T/16 , later re-branded NonStop I . The machine consisted of between two and 16 CPUs, organized as a fault-tolerant computer cluster packaged in a single rack. Each CPU had its own private, unshared memory, its own I/O processor, its own private I/O bus to connect to I/O controllers, and dual connections to all the other CPUs over a custom inter-CPU backplane bus called Dynabus . Each disk controller or network controller

11988-410: Was the largest initial public offering in the history of Silicon Valley , and it created an $ 8 billion company with about 30,000 employees, manufacturing scientific instruments , semiconductors , optical networking devices, and electronic test equipment for telecom and wireless, research and development , and production. In July 1999, HP appointed Carly Fiorina as the first female CEO of

12099-505: Was then midway in porting its NonStop product line from MIPS R12000 microprocessors to Intel's new Itanium Merced microprocessors. This project was restarted with Alpha as the new target to align NonStop with Compaq's other large server lines. But in 2001, Compaq terminated all Alpha engineering investments in favor of the Itanium microprocessors, before any new NonStop products were released on Alpha. In 2001, Hewlett-Packard similarly made

12210-517: Was then translated to equivalent partially optimized MIPS instruction sequences at kernel install time by a tool called the Accelerator. Less-important programs could also be executed directly without pre-translation, via a TNS code interpreter . These migration techniques were successful and remain in use today. End-user software was brought over without extra work, the performance was good enough for mid-range machines, and programmers could ignore

12321-779: Was unrelated to Tandem's original "Integrity" series for Unix.) Because it was not possible to run Itanium McKinley chips with clock-level lock stepping, the Integrity NonStop machines instead lock stepped using comparisons between chip states at longer time scales, at interrupt points and at various software synchronization points in between interrupts. The intermediate synchronization points were automatically triggered at every n'th taken branch instruction and were also explicitly inserted into long loop bodies by all NonStop compilers. The machine design supported both dual and triple redundancy, with either two or three physical microprocessors per logical Itanium processor. The triple version

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