Pyramid Technology Corporation was a computer company that produced a number of RISC-based minicomputers at the upper end of the performance range.
[1] It was based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California They also became the second company to ship a multiprocessor UNIX system (branded DC/OSx), in 1985, which formed the basis of their product line into the early 1990s.
The first Pyramid Technology series of minicomputers was released in August 1983[7][8] as the 90x superminicomputer, which used their custom 32-bit scalar processor running at 8 MHz.
It used a "sliding window" register model based on the Berkeley RISC processor, but memory access instructions had complex operation modes that could require many cycles to run.
The 90x competed with the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX 11/780 which was the preferred platform for running UNIX in the early 1980s.
Pyramid was indirectly assisted by DEC's reluctance to sell VAX machines without the VMS operating system, for which they charged a considerable amount of money.
Many universities wanted to run UNIX rather than VMS, so Pyramid's higher performance and lower price, coupled with artificial delivery delays or surcharges from DEC, helped them to make the risky decision to buy from a new manufacturer.
One of the 90x's biggest advantages over the competition was its asynchronous serial port controller (the ITS or Intelligent Terminal Server) based on a 16-bit bit-slice processor.
The ITS interfaced to 16 serial ports, and it could run them at very high speeds, using DMA to feed from daisy-chained output data blocks.
The software run by the administrative processor was initially called the Totally Unrealistic Remote Diagnostic.
At least one machine in Australia spend six months installed in a retired outdoor lavatory with an air-conditioner replacing the louvered window and the system console terminal sitting on top of the cabinet.
The fully loaded 9845 ran at about 25 MIPS, a respectable figure for the era, though not competitive with high-end supercomputers.
[10] Like many of the early multiprocessor vendors, Pyramid turned to "commodity" RISC CPUs when they started to become practical.
ICF went on to provide the cluster foundation in the PrimeCluster HA software which is still developed and available from Fujitsu Siemens.
The compute nodes were physically installed in the HAAS-3 frames that shipped as drive arrays with the earlier Nile product.
The largest mesh constructed at Pyramid was a test system containing 214 CPUs including four Nile SMP nodes.