Kendall Square Research
It was co-founded by Steven Frank[1] and Henry Burkhardt III, who had formerly helped found Data General and Encore Computer and was one of the original team that designed the PDP-8.
Being all cache, memory dynamically migrated and replicated in a coherent manner based on the access pattern of individual processors.
The processors were arranged in a hierarchy of rings, and the operating system mediated process migration and device access.
The KAP program (Kuck & Associate Preprocessor) provided for pre-processing for source code analysis and parallelization.
The CEU handled instruction fetch (two per clock), and all operations involving memory, such as loads and stores.
The programmer (or compiler) could implicitly control the quashing behavior of the subsequent two instructions that would be initiated during the branch.
As the company scaled up quickly to enter production, they moved in the late 1980s to 170 Tracer Lane, Waltham, Massachusetts.
KSR refocused its efforts from the scientific to the commercial marketplace, with emphasis on parallel relational databases and OLTP operations.
It then got out of the hardware business, but continued to market some of its data warehousing and analysis software products.
A few KSR1 models were sold, and as the KSR2 was being rolled out, the company collapsed amid accounting irregularities involving the overstatement of revenue.
One customer of the KSR2, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a United States Department of Energy facility, purchased an enormous number of spare parts, and kept their machines running for years after the demise of KSR.
In April of 1996, the SEC filed a complaint against the company and several officers (Burkhardt III, the CEO and President; Peter Appleton Jones, the highest-ranked sales executive; and Karl G Wassman III, the CFO and CAO) for issuing materially false and misleading financial statements for six quarters in 1992 and 1993.
These individuals and Thomas J MacCormack, director of contracts administration, were also accused of selling KSR stock while in possession of material nonpublic information.
[2][3] All were ordered to pay disgorgements representing losses avoided as well as fines and interest accrued.
"[2][3] KSR's competitors included MasPar Computer Corporation, Thinking Machines, Meiko Scientific, and various old-line (and still surviving) companies like IBM and Intel.
