Biin Box, was 960 / 860 Board

From: Innfogra_at_aol.com <(Innfogra_at_aol.com)>
Date: Fri Apr 21 17:28:32 2000

The BIIN Computer was not a workstation. It was a fault tolerant transaction
processing machine of the late 1980s. It was to compete against Tandon and
IBM. The plans were to build 100 machines and put them out for trial and then
ramp up for production.

It used a variant of the i860 with multiple processors and 64 or 128 Megs of
ram, a 300 Meg HD for SW and mirrored IPI drives for data. Nice computer with
the entire chassis made to very high German standards in Germany and
airfreighted to here (Portland, OR).

Unfortunately we had a contract to dismantle and destroy all the machines
returned to intel after they closed down. Intel pulled all of the processor
chips before they even got to us. A very interesting machine, the chassis
took four hours to strip by our most experienced person.

For intel, Siemens was impossible to deal with, talk about a culture clash.
They were happy to see the project end. Intel had 5 or 10% with Siemens the
rest. When it became apparent that it was going to cost a huge amount of
money to compete, the BIIN Company was offered for sale and then shut down
and liquidated.

I have the original nail board for the BIIN Processor Card with all of it's
original documentation. If anyone out there is interested please contact me
off line at whoagiii_at_aol.com. I got the nail bed in another sale that was not
covered under the contract.

Paxton
Received on Fri Apr 21 2000 - 17:28:32 BST