Encore Computer

Encore Computer was an early pioneer in the parallel computing market, based in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Although offering a number of system designs beginning in 1985, they were never as well known as other companies in this field such as Pyramid Technology, Alliant, and the most similar systems Sequent and FLEX.

Encore was founded in 1983 by: Kenneth Fisher, former CEO of Prime Computer; Gordon Bell, an engineering vice president from Digital Equipment Corporation responsible for the development of the VAX; and, Henry Burkhardt III, co-founder of Data General and Kendall Square Research. Their goal was to build massively parallel machines from commodity processors; their first design, the Multimax, was released in September 1985. This was one of the first commercial designs to make use of bus snooping, allowing many processors to share the same memory efficiently.

The original Multimax could support from one to ten pairs of 10 MHz National Semiconductor NS32032 processors, a 32-bit CISC design similar to that of the Motorola 68000. Subsequent Multimax models supported NS32332 and NS32532 processors at higher clock rates. The last National-based Multimax was the model 500 offered in 1989. All models ran the user's choice of BSD or System V Unix or Mach. All three operating systems were modified for parallel computing. However, soon after the 500's release, National stopped development of the NS32032 design.

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