Systems Engineering Laboratories

Systems Engineering Laboratories (also called SEL) was a manufacturer of minicomputers in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was one of the first 32-bit realtime computer system manufacturers. Realtime computers are used for process control and monitoring.

Systems Engineering Laboratories was founded and incorporated in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1959, at the beginning of the breakout of minicomputers from 16-bit to larger architectures.

SEL was purchased by Gould Electronics in 1981 and was operated essentially unchanged as the Gould Computer Systems Division (CSD). The parent company was acquired by Nippon Mining in 1988, but as part of the U.S. government approval of the deal, Nippon Mining was required to divest the Gould divisions that did work for the Department of Defense, including the Computer Systems Division. Later, in 1989, Encore Computer Corporation (about 250 employees) bought the computer division (about 2500 employees) from Nippon Mining. Parts of Encore were sold off over the years, with the last major spin-off being their Storage Products Group, sold to Sun Microsystems in 1997. This left the company consisting primarily of their real-time group (the original SEL core) and returned to this business niche after renaming themselves Encore Real Time Computing. In 2002, Compro Computer Services, Inc. (a former service competitor, and later service partner) obtained SEL/Gould/Encore real-time technological assets through its acquisition of Encore Real Time Computing, Inc., and continues support of the legacy SelBUS-based product line as far back as the 32/55 and offers an upgrade path using the Legacy Computer Replacement System (LCRS) hardware simulator. Compro Computer Services, Inc continue trading as Encore in Europe, COMPRO continues the tradition of long-term product support by offering replacement solutions (e.g., the Legacy Computer Replacement System, or LCRS) that emphasize backward-compatibility coupled with future-proofing. Gould (as well as its primary competitors MASSCOMP, Harris and Concurrent) were driven into the ground by general purpose microprocessor Unix designs such as those by Sun and SGI.

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