Elxsi

Elxsi was a minicomputer manufacturing company established in the late 1970's along with a host of other competitors ( Trilogy, Sequent, Convex Computer). The Elxsi processor was an ECL ( Emitter Coupled Logic) design that featured a 50 nanosecond clock, a 25 nanosecond backpanel bus, IEEE Floating Point arithmetic and a 64 bit architecture. It allowed multiple processors to communicate over a common bus called the Gigabus. The operating system was a message based operating system called EMBOS. The Elxsi cpu was a microcoded design, allowing custom instructions to be coded into microcode.

History

Elxsi was founded in 1979 by Joe Rizzi who had been a manager at Intersil. Much of the architecture of the Elxsi machine was designed by former Stanford University professors Len Sher and Balasubrimanian Kumar. Another key contributor to the design was Harold ( Mac) McFarlane, who was also a key designer on the team that created the PDP-11. Venture investors in Elxsi included Tata Corp ( India) and Arthur Rock. George Taylor ( on the IEEE standard committee and a student of Cal Berkeley Professor Kahan) provided a key design for the IEEE floating point unit. Elxsi was bought out by Gene Amdahl with money that was left over from the Trilogy venture.

Famous Employees

Although Elxsi was not a financial success, many of its employees did go on to fame and fortune.

Ralph Merkle ( who wrote the Fortran Compiler) later became a noted nanotechnologist.
Rob Catlin became an early employee of Chips and Technologies.
Tampy Thomas became a founder of NexGen, which was later acquired by AMD. The NexGen design became the design for the AMD 486 processor.
B. V. Jagadish became a founder of Exodus Communications and NetScaler
Bob Rau and Arun Kumar became founders of Cydrome. Bob then worked at HP and was an architect of the Itanium processor.
Alan Roberts and Harlan Lau become early employees of Rambus