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Interesting history JJ.  I didn't know what happened to Celerity after everyone left.  I worked for Steve Vallendar, with Nick Aneshansley, and I worked with all of the hardware guys that went to Celerity.  Steve assembled a good group of people.

JJ - I do believe that we worked together.  I was in hardware from 1964-1986, then I transferred to Manufacturing.  I worked on the CRAM 2, Century 50/100/150, Criterion series (V and I), Sumitomo memories (Century and Criterion), I9300/9400, and the I10000 series.  B/T/W, they did continue the CRAM into the Century series as the 653.  I don't recall when it was discontinued as I was no longer working on it.

My brain is almost 10 years older and there are a few gaps too.
Once in a while I'm in contact with Paul by e-mail.
Season's greetings and best wishes for the New Year for you too!
Cheers, Wally.

Thanx for the links.  Other than Paul Wood, I don't recall any of the others in the links.

Having tuned 63 this year, my memories are fading fast as it has been 30+ years.

I truly enjoyed my time in BDA and have no regrets.

All the best for the coming Christmas season!

Cheers,
Ed

Hi "Big" Ed,
I know the group "I worked in Bermuda". But I have stopped my activities in Facebook about 2 years ago.
BTW there is another group in Facebook, it's called "BBM - NCR Bermuda" and was started by Jim Ferguson. It is a closed group.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/122732011269639/

A further group is "Bermuda Friends from the 70's", which is a public group.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/59822659496/

And the group "Old Bermuda: Our Island, Our History", a closed group, might be of interest too.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/OldBermuda/

After working for BBM I was in charge for EDP at "The MarketPlace" in Bermuda.
At the time you worked for BBM, I was part-owner of "Advanced Software", in those days located in the Armoury Building on Reid Street.

Some of the people, I knew at BBM and in Bermuda in general, have passed away (RIP).

Regards Wally.

Hello Wally (I hope you are still active on these forums),

I worked at BBM from 1984 to the end of 1986, primarily on the Criterion Mainframes.  There is a group on Facebook called "I used to work in Bermuda" and you can catch up with a couple of ex-BBMers there as well.

Regards,
"Big" Ed.

Celerity Computing was not NCR but since it was formed by NCR employees (from Rancho Bernardo and Scripps Ranch in San Diego) and used an NCR processor chip, I thought a brief description is appropriate for this forum.

Celerity was formed in 1983 By Steve Vallender (President), Nick Aneshansley (V P of hardware development) and Drew McCrocklin (VP of software development) all from NCR. The idea behind the new company was that the high speed microprocessor that was used to execute Criterion firmware could be turned into a high speed, direct execution computer for graphic processing which would operate in an office environment and compete with other newly formed companies in an emerging marketplace (like Apollo and Sun Microsystems).

Other NCR employees were quickly brought on board: #4 was Karl Lehman (who would do device drivers) and #5 was me (J. J. Whelan, to work on the port of the Unix Operating System). Others on the software side were: Jeff Anderson (who was familiar with Unix and would also work on the port), Sandra Lee (to do utilities and who was just a general keep everyone's head focused sort of individual), Patricia Shanahan (who would port the Unix compilers), Clark Masters (to take care of operations, software tools and configuration management) and Stephanie McCartney (to do product builds and integration as well as general support). Hardware Engineers from NCR included Jim Kocol, Jim Gilbert and Gary Gilbert. On the software side we were joined by an excellent group of developers from the Burroughs office in Rancho Bernardo. The offices and final hardware assembly were located in a building in Scripps Ranch across the freeway from the NCR facility.

The main challenges were two fold: To turn the 16 bit architecture of the execution side of the chip into a full fledged 32 bit architecture and to provide virtual storage capability on a chip that didn't possess the fault mechanisms to properly suspend operations when a memory location was not available. Implementation was aided by the fact that the chip provided for a large number of external registers (intended for I/O) that could be used to implement the interface with the new hardware and (most importantly) that the chip had a full 32  bit access to external data memory. The founders had already come up with the basics for solving these difficulties and it fell to the rest of us to fill in the details.

This was an excellent team with both managers and others who had experience in designing, creating and delivering products to schedule. The initial development was done on a DEC VAX system and BSD Unix was the Unix base. The operating system goal was to exactly match the behavior of the VAX system.

The resulting system turned out to be more of a competitor with the DEC VAX products than with the originally intended graphics office systems.

The second system produced was a dual processing system and Jeff Anderson and I created what I believe was the first commercially available multi-processor Unix kernel.

The fact that the system was being used mostly in scientific processing environments led to the decision that we should focus on the low end of the supercomputer market. The next product was an up to eight processor high performance system based on a high speed clone of the NCR chip build out of generally available integrated circuits. However, sales of systems didn't make up for the cost of development and the company was merged with FPS Systems in Beaverton Oregon.

FPS was a very successful manufacturer of scientific array processors which were attached to DEC and IBM equipment. They were encountering decreasing sales because DEC and IBM were providing their own array processors (often integrated with their system). The idea was that the merged company could provide a high performance scientific system with array processing capabilities that would compete with DEC, if not IBM. This hope was buoyed by the fact that FPS had a successful sales team and record in the desired marketplaces. The Mainframe development remained in San Diego under the same management though Clark Masters took over from Steve Vallender..

It was also realized that the Celerity team would not be able to keep up with the rapidly growing high performance micro-chips and it was decided to move away from the NCR based architecture. After looking into the possibilities, the decision was to use the Sun Microsystems SPARC architecture. A high performance SPARC chip was already in development and Sun had no plans to develop a supercomputing system using it and that meant elerity would have Sun's full cooperation. SPARC also already had the, UCB Unix based, Solaris operating system and it was simple matter to move the multi-processing capabilities to that version.

The combined company sold several systems but was unable to maintain itself and was bought by Cray and then sold to Sun where it ended its life as the "Sun Supercomputing" division.

Heiko, It wasn't until VRX (Centurion not Century though they had almost identical instruction sets and API's) that an indexed sequential access method was provided as part of the standard software. That was available on disks, not CRAM which was pretty much discontinued with the Century series.

As implementer of the B1 executive/kernel and designer and implementer of the B2 executive/kernel I can definitively state that "B" meant "Basic" meaning fundamental, not related to the programming language of that name. Probably reasonable for B1 but the others became more and more divorced from just providing the fundamentals but the "B" was retained.

Shortly after I completed the work on the 315 On-line Banking Executive for teh 321 controller and it became a product, there was an emergency support request from the Philippines. A system had been ordered for the Philippine National Bank and they were planning a big roll-out of their first on-line system within a couple of weeks. We were told that the system wasn't working and that since the then-president Marcos was scheduled to attend the openning it was imperative that the problem be corrected. I spent a day running around L.A. getting a visa and passport and was on a plane to Manila the next day with the 321 hardware engineer.

We arrived to discover that the problem was that much of the equipment had been left out in the tropical rain in a leaky container. New equipment was shipped by air and the system came up and ran perfectly. I spent the week training the support team in the On-line software system.

One think about the visit I won't forget was that the Philippine branch had an apartment for visitors with a maid who prepared breakfast for us every morning. She taught me how to prepare mangoes.