Ridge Computers
Ridge Computers, Inc., was an American computer manufacturer active from 1980 to 1990. The company began as a builder of deskside workstations and workgroup servers and progressed to superminicomputers. They claimed to have produced the first commercially available Reduced instruction set computer systems.
Company history
Ridge Computers was established in May 1980 in Santa Clara, California by six original founders, five of whom had come from Hewlett-Packard, and one from Zilog.The company was named for the Montebello Ridge, where two of the founders used to go cycling.
Ridge's first prototype was running by autumn 1981, and entered beta testing one and a half years later in early 1983. The system was presented at the Comdex show in autumn 1983. The earliest CPUs were bit slice processors built from "Fast" type 7400-series integrated circuits and Programmable Array Logic devices.
The Ridge CPU's qualification as a RISC design has been challenged due to its use of variable length instructions, multiple-cycle instruction decode, microcoded control store, and relatively rich instruction set, with over 100 instructions. Other sources reaffirm the Ridge's RISC bona fides.
Ridge faced competition not only from Digital Equipment Corporation's popular VAX-11, but also from other early RISC adopters Celerity Computing and Pyramid Technology, the latter of which began shipping systems in March 1984.
Although considered closer in configuration and capability to contemporary workstations, Ridge described their early systems as "personal mainframes". Their original target market was designers and engineers running scientific and technical applications, including computer-aided design, computer imaging and animation, and scientific research. A significant customer was Pacific Data Images, who switched from DEC VAXen to Ridge 32s, reporting a doubling of performance.
In the early 1980s, the French government was negotiating cooperative technology agreements between French and foreign companies. Also around this time, Jacques Stern, newly installed Director and CEO of Groupe Bull, became interested in adding RISC-based products to his company's offerings. Bull finalized an agreement to share technologies with both Convergent Technologies and Ridge Computers.
Around September 1985, Ridge named Robert J. Kunze, of Hambrecht & Quist Group and Hambrecht & Quist Venture Partners, to their Board of Directors.
In the mid-1980s Ridge began to experience financial difficulties. In early 1986 the company was refinanced, receiving US$1,000,000 out of a planned US$10,000,000 from Hambrecht & Quist, and Groupe Bull. Bob O. Evans, a general partner in Hambrecht & Quist, was appointed chief executive officer.
In mid-1986, Ridge launched an Academic discount program in the UK similar to a program they had already established in the US.
In 1987, Ridge and Apollo Computer entered into a joint marketing agreement that promoted a hybrid configuration of Apollo workstations networked to a Ridge supermini.
By the late 1980s Ridge realized that unless they implemented their architecture in Very Large Scale Integration semiconductor technology, it would become uncompetitive. While some experimental CPUs were produced using gate array technology from Fujitsu, no VLSI-based systems were shipped.
In early 1988, Ridge underwent a restructuring that saw a 45% reduction in personnel, Michael Preletz installed as CEO, and a new focus on commercial sales, while delivery of the new CPU for the 5100 model was further delayed. Ridge was dissolved in April 1990.
Reports of the number of systems sold by Ridge Computers vary from four hundred to six hundred units. Several hundred others were manufactured and sold under license by Bull. The total system count has been estimated to have been one thousand systems.
Although not a product of Ridge Computers, the Cerberus multiprocessor simulator used a processor model with an instruction set architecture derived from that of the Ridge 32's CPU.
People
At their peak, Ridge employed about one hundred fifty people. The founders and some former employees are listed below:Founders
- Edward J. Basart came from Hewlett Packard, where he worked on the HP 3000 system. At Ridge he was involved in software development, and was the vice-president software. Basart was one of three that left Ridge to establish Network Computing Devices.
- Dave Folger was the only original founder that came to Ridge from Zilog. He was initially involved in software development, and later became president and chief executive officer. Folger left the company in April 1986.
- Ron Kolb came from HP. He was involved in hardware development.
- Hugh Martin came from HP. At Ridge, he was involved in hardware development. From Ridge, Martin moved to Apple Computer, where he was involved with Project Aquarius.
- John Sell came from Hewlett Packard, where he had worked on the HP 3000 Series 40 and 44 models. He was involved in hardware development at Ridge. At the suggestion of Arthur Rock, Sell went from Ridge to Apple, where he led the team creating the PowerPC Macintosh architecture.
- Neil C. Wilhelm came to Ridge from HP. He left the company after just a few months.
Other staff
- Sally Ahnger worked on file systems and distributed systems at Ridge. From Ridge she went to Sun Microsystems.
- Judy Bruner served as Chief Financial Officer from December 1984 until April 1988. She had also come to Ridge from HP. From Ridge she went to 3Com.
- Bob Cook, an engineer and mechanical designer, was with Ridge from 1984 to 1989. He was the sole designer of the Ridge 32S enclosure.
- Dave Cornelius was Ridge's Senior Software Engineer from October 1982 to January 1988. He left Ridge to go to NCD.
- Dale Dell'Ario is a program manager, designer, and engineer who was at Ridge from March 1983 to February 1987.
- Aprelle Deuell was a staff accountant from March 1985 to August 1988.
- Mike Haden was a programmer working with the Green Hills compiler for Ridge. He later worked for Green Hills Software Inc. directly.
- Michael Harrigan was a product manager at Ridge. Harrigan was one of three that left Ridge to establish NCD.
- Mehdi Jazayeri was the project manager for programming languages at Ridge from March 1985 to April 1986. His work included developing optimizing compiler technology.
- Marjorie Kondo was hired as the company secretary, and later became the administrator of personnel and facilities management.
- Bruce K. Leisz was vice-president of manufacturing from April 1983 to February 1988.
- Christopher B. Paisley was Chief Financial Officer & Vice-president of Finance for three years.
- Chip Pessa was the Director of CPU development.
- Nicholas D'Arcy Roche was appointed president and chief operating officer in October 1986. Prior to this Roche had spent twenty-five years at IBM, then gone to Soft Switch.
- Marilyn Miller Roche worked on developing a telemarketing department for the company.
- Michael Schulman was an application engineer at Ridge from 1984 to 1987. Schulman next worked for SGI.
- Bill Shellooe was a vice-president of Marketing and Sales.
- Michael Splain came to Ridge from Vitesse Semiconductor, and was a member of the technical staff from February 1987 to February 1988. He was responsible for developing diagnostic tools for the single-chip Ridge CPU. From Ridge he went to Sun Microsystems.
- Harry Taxin was a vice-president of Marketing & Sales.
Products
Ridge Operating System (ROS)
Early Ridge Computers systems ran the Ridge Operating System. ROS is a message-passing operating system with inexpensive processes and virtual memory. Its internal structure is significantly different from that of Unix. The ROS kernel and that of the related Groupe Bull SPS 9 OS were described as microkernels by the developers who worked on them. ROS is based on Stanford University's V-system, and Ridge's long-term goal was to provide a distributed system with full network transparency.The basic operating system comprises a small kernel, originally only 8 KB in size, which handles memory management, interprocess communications, and interrupt handling, with other functions provided by a set of server processes. The User Monitor server process presented a Unix-compatible interface to user processes, and the Directory Manager and Volume Manager emulated the Unix file system. Collectively these services were called a Unix compatibility layer. ROS incorporated features from both Unix System V and BSD universes.
One assessment reported poor performance when running ROS in multiuser mode. A paper by Basart identified issues with how ROS handled programs written for a Unix environment, particularly how the OS handled Unix's process fork and kill. Suggested improvements included moving the file system into the kernel, and revising the message primitives used by ROS. Later even the founders saw ROS as a liability in the market.
By 1987 Ridge began to offer a standard version of Unix that had been ported to the Ridge architecture by Bull. This operating system, called RX/V on Ridge-branded systems, eventually supplanted ROS on most Ridge models.