Biin Box, was 960 / 860 Board

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Fri Apr 21 17:44:09 2000

Paxton wrote:
> 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.

I was peripherally involved in the software development for the machine
back in 1986, and I can assure you that we most certainly were designing
workstations as well as servers.

> 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
No, it did not use *any* variant of the i860. It used the predecessor of
the i960, which was code-named Gemini and P7. This processor was in some
sense a successor to the ill-fated iAPX 432. It was not in any way
"compatible" with the 432, but the objectives (fault tolerance in both
hardware and software) were the same, and they learned from the mistakes
of the 432 design. Some of the 432 designers worked on the P7.

The i860 was not even sampled until 1990, and did not have any focus
on fault tolerance. It was intended for floating-point intensive
applications. Although it was possible to run Unix on it, it was not
especially well-suited for it.
Received on Fri Apr 21 2000 - 17:44:09 BST