Talk:Kendall Square Research

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I am not aware of any more than 1 machine delivered by KSR and that was to ORNL. I am not certain what "moderate" means in the context of this page. -(anon 3 June 2004 198.123.22.50)

I worked there at the time. There were at least two machines shipped, but I think there were more. Some university had a page about their KSR up, several years after the company ceased to exist. -Harmil 10:35, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

There was a KSR1 at the University of Manchester in the UK. I used it briefly, and wrote a single program to get to know the machine (a Mandelbrot program, using pthreads) but then funding for it vanished, and access to the machine was terminated. I think this was in 1995.

KSR delivered systems to the Univ. of Manchester, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Massachusetts, CalTech, several commercial customers (I believe that at least a small configuration, part of a larger system contracted, was up and running, but am uncertain), and several other places. I would have to research to be certain, but believe that there may have been a dozen or so systems up and running, and a number more in production for customers, when the company collapsed. The technology and product engineering was superb, and the underlying architecture was a major step forward in computing. The combination of the times and of the management failures were fatal, and thus robbed the rapidly growing customer base-- and the world -- of the full realization of what could have been a major step forward in both business and computing for the 21st century. Indeed, very sad precurser of the impact of greed and dishonesty, similar though much smaller than what we saw a decade later, with MCI Worldcom and Enron.