Have you ever heard of the Encore 91 computer system, developed and built by Encore Computer Corporation? I stumbled upon the name of this system on the website for the Macintosh like virtual window manager (MLVWM), an old X11 window manager designed to copy some of the look and feel of the classic Mac OS, and wanted to know more about it. An old website from what appears to be a reseller of the Encore 91 has a detailed description and sales pitch of the machine still online, and it’s a great read.
The hardware architecture of the Encore 91 series is based on the Motorola high-performance 88100 25MHz RISC processor. A basic system is a highly integrated fully symmetrical single board multiprocessor. The single board includes two or four 88100 processors with supporting cache memory, 16 megabytes of shared main memory, two synchronous SCSI ports, an Ethernet port, 4 asynchronous ports, real-time clocks, timers, interrupts and a VME-64 bus interface. The VME-64 bus provides full compatibility with VME plus enhancements for greater throughput. Shared main memory may be expanded to 272 megabytes (mb) by adding up to four expansion cards. The expansion memory boards have the same high-speed access characteristics as local memory.
↫ Encore computing 91 system
The Encore 91 ran a combination of AT&T’s system V.3.2 UNIX and Encore’s POSIX-compliant MicroMPX real-time kernel, and would be followed by machines with more powerful processors in the 88xxx series, as well as machines based on the Alpha architecture. The company also created and sold its own modified RISC architecture, RSX, for which there are still some details available online. Bits and bobs of the company were spun off and sold off, and I don’t think much of the original company is still around today.
Regardless, it’s an interesting system with an interesting history, but we’ll most likely never get to see oe in action – unless it turns up in some weird corner of the United States where the rare working examples of hardware like this invariably tends to end up.
I hadn’t heard of this one, but I did get a chance to briefly see and use a Motorola 88K-based computer at VCF East, and it was very well-built and surprisingly snappy! It was running a relatively recent NetBSD. Probably Motorola had something here, but realized it just wasn’t going to be worth it to compete with their own arch and went in for PowerPC instead (sort of how everyone else went in for Itanium, except PowerPC was a lot better).
WOW! 4 CPUs, 25 Mhz, RISC! (“RISC architecture is going to change everything”) and it included SIMD extensions. 88K passed me by although I knew about it. The firm I worked for actually used Transputers – albeit briefly.
Lovely 88K docs right here → https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_motorola88ersManual1991_53620044/page/n81/mode/2up
FWIW The 88K did not support SIMD extensions.