In order to regain some of the small-team flexibility that seemed essential to progress in the field, ETA was created in 1983 with the mandate to build a 10 GFLOPS machine by 1986.

Nevertheless, shortly thereafter CDC exited the supercomputer market entirely, giving away remaining ETA machines free to high schools through the SuperQuest computer science competition.

The basic layout was a shared-memory multiprocessor with up to 8 CPUs, each capable of 4 double-precision or 8 single-precision operations per clock cycle, and up to 18 I/O processors.

Even though it was based on then-current CMOS technologies, the low temperature allowed the CPUs to operate with a ~7 ns cycle time, so a fully loaded ETA-10 was capable of about 9.1 GFLOPS.

At the time Unix was making major inroads into the supercomputing fields, but ETA decided to write their own EOS operating system, which wasn't ready when the first machines were delivered in late 1986 and early 1987.

Many sites that had refused to pay for their machines due to the low quality of EOS found ETA's UNIX completely usable and were willing to accept delivery.

This compiler retained vendor-specific programming performance features (known as the Q8* subroutine calls) in an era when supercomputer users were realizing the necessity of source code portability between architectures.

Additionally, the compiler optimizations were not keeping up with existing technology as shown by the Japanese supercomputer vendors such as NEC, or at Cray Research and the newer minisupercomputer makers.

According to one of the CPU designers at ETA, Neil told a story that his sons actually came up with the name: apparently a linotype machine has characters arranged in the order of frequency used in the English language and the first three letters were used.