PERQ

The design of the PERQ was heavily influenced by the original workstation computer, the Xerox Alto, which was never commercially produced.

The workstation was conceived by six former Carnegie Mellon University alumni and employees: Brian S. Rosen, James R. Teter, William H. Broadley, J. Stanley Kriz, Raj Reddy and Paul G. Newbury, who formed the startup Three Rivers Computer Corporation (3RCC) in 1974.

The name "PERQ" was chosen both as an acronym of "Pascal Engine that Runs Quicker," and to evoke the word perquisite commonly called a perk, that is an additional employee benefit.

[1] In June 1979, the company took its very first order from the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the computer was officially launched in August 1979 at SIGGRAPH in Chicago.

It went out of business in 1986, largely due to competition from other workstation manufacturers such as Sun Microsystems, Apollo Computer and Silicon Graphics.

The PERQ CPU was unusual in having 20-bit wide registers and a writable control store (WCS), allowing the microcode to be redefined.

These were similar to the IOB, with the addition of a non-volatile real-time clock, a second RS-232 port, and (on the EIO board) an Ethernet interface.

The PERQ 3A had an all-new hardware architecture based around a 12.5 MHz Motorola 68020 microprocessor, 68881 floating-point unit and 68450 Direct Memory Access Controller, plus two AMD 29116A 32-bit bit slice processors which acted as graphics co-processors.

[7] The workstation was also known internally as Python, was developed in 1986 jointly by MegaScan and Conner Scelza Associates (both in Gibsonia, PA, U.S.A.) and the Crosfield team (in Hemel Hempstead, England).

Crosfield (led by Andrew Chapman) were the overall project managers and had embedded engineers in MegaScan (Simon Butler and Mark Somervail) and Conner Scelza (Roger Willcocks).

[12] The Crosfield requirement was for a very high performance graphics system (known as Viper, developed by their subsidiary benchMark Technologies) and a large (at the time) amount of disk storage.

The Crosfield team in Hemel Hempstead developed an early RAID solution that supported up to 8 SCSI controllers operating in parallel with data streaming from 5¼-inch full-height drives and a fast fibre-optic network known as GALAN.

DP ("Drawing Program"), a CAD system used for creating circuit diagrams on the PERQ, was written by Dario Giuse at CMU.