The Convex company was started with the aim of producing cheap vector computers.
In fact the first machines, the C-series, were called "the little Crays". The reason was
because of their
architectural similarity with the Cray 1-2 machines that would have enabled the users
to develop and tune their programs on the C-series cheap machines and run the production
jobs on the fastest Cray machines with the maximum performance, without any need of
changing or tuning the code.
The C series were started in 1985.
The SPP series were started in 1994 with the SPP1000 machine. This was an MPP system based on 8 HP processors. It was the second commercial computer with virtual shared memory, the first one being the KSR1 by Kendall Square Research, first installed in 1991.
In 1994 Hewlett-Packard acquires Convex.
Edited by: Maurizio Cremonesi
Last modified: May 8, 2002