Encore was founded in 1983 by: Kenneth Fisher, former CEO of Prime Computer; Gordon Bell, an engineering vice president from Digital Equipment Corporation responsible for the development of the VAX; and, Henry Burkhardt III, co-founder of Data General and Kendall Square Research.

[1] Their goal was to build massively parallel machines from commodity processors; their first design, the Multimax, was released in September 1985.

Trying again, this time in the high-performance real-time market, Encore turned to the Alpha 21064 to create the Infinity R/T Model 300, which first shipped in late 1994.

This left the company consisting primarily of their real-time group and the original SEL core, returning to this business niche.

A sample Encore Multimax system donated from the Naval Postgraduate School is in storage at the Computer History Museum.

[4] The original Multimax could support from one to ten pairs of 10 MHz National Semiconductor NS32032 processors, a 32-bit CISC design similar to that of the Motorola 68000.