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Concept
Systems Concepts
Résumé
Systems Concepts, Inc. (now the SC Group), was a company co-founded by Stewart Nelson and Mike Levitt focused on making hardware products related to the DEC PDP-10 series of computers. One of its major products was the SA-10, an interface which allowed PDP-10s to be connected to disk and tape drives designed for use with the channel interfaces of IBM mainframes.
Later, Systems Concepts attempted to produce a compatible replacement for the DEC PDP-10 computers. "Mars" was the code name for a family of PDP-10-compatible computers built by Systems Concepts, including the initial SC-30M, the smaller SC-25, and the slower SC-20. These machines were marvels of engineering design; although not much slower than the unique Foonly F-1, they were physically smaller and consumed less power than the much slower DEC KS10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machines. They were also completely compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binaries (including the operating system) with no modifications at about 2-3 times faster than a KL10.
When DEC cancelled the Jupiter project in 1983, Systems Concepts hoped to sell their machine to customers with a software investment in PDP-10s. Their spring 1984 announcement generated excitement in the PDP-10 world. TOPS-10 was running on the Mars by the summer of 1984, and TOPS-20 by early fall. However, people at Systems Concepts were better at designing machines than at mass-producing or selling them; the company continually improved the design, but lost credibility as delivery dates continued to slip. They also overpriced; believing they were competing with the KL10 and VAX 8600 and not startups such as Sun Microsystems building workstations with comparable power at a fraction of the price. By the time SC shipped the first SC-30M to Stanford University in late 1985, most customers had already abandoned the PDP-10, usually for VMS or Unix systems. Nevertheless, a number were purchased by CompuServe, which depended on PDP-10s to run its online service and was eager to move to newer but fully compatible systems.
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