Celerity Computing, Inc., was a publicly traded vendor of Unix-based minisupercomputers based in San Diego, California. Celerity Computing was founded in May 1983 by Steve Vallender, Nick Aneshansley and Andrew McCroklin. All were former employees of

NCR Corporation NCR Voyix Corporation, previously known as NCR Corporation and National Cash Register, is a global software, consulting and technology company providing several professional services and Electronics, electronic products. It manufactured Self-c ...

. Celerity shipped its first product, the C1200 Personal Workstation in November 1984. The C1200 was the first in a series of machines using the ACCEL RISC architecture, based on the NCR/32 32-bit processor. The C1200 offered a color monitor with up to 1280 by 1024 resolution. The C1200 was followed by the C1230 and C1260 models. The C1260 offered a dual processor option. The C1230 and C1260 were often used as multi-user systems. The C1200 series ran a version of BSD 4.2 Unix with System V Release 2 functionality merged in. Celerity attempted to make the transition to being a minisupercomputer vendor with the development of the Celerity 6000, based on the ACCEL architecture implemented in ECL based on parts from

Bipolar Integrated Technology Bipolar Integrated Technology, Inc. (BIT), later Bit, Inc., was a privately held semiconductor company based in Beaverton, Oregon, which sold products implemented with emitter-coupled logic technology. The company was founded in 1983 by former F ...

. The Celerity 6000 had a 33-MHz system clock and up to 8 processors (max 8 scalar processors or 4 scalar processors and 4 vector processors). After running into financial difficulties during the development of the Celerity 6000, the assets and technologies of Celerity Computing were acquired by Floating Point Systems—itself financially ailing—in September 1988. The Celerity 6000 was completed and released as the FPS Model 500 minisupercomputer. Celerity's assets changed hands multiple times in the following years through acquisitions and selloffs: Floating Point Systems sold to

Cray Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed ...

in 1991; Cray sold to

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

in 1996; and Silicon Graphics sold their Cray Business Systems Division to

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

later that year. Many of the software and hardware engineers who were employed at Celerity—including McCrocklin and Campbell—were kept on board all the way to Sun Microsystems and beyond. The business unit they worked in under Sun Microsystems was renamed to Enterprise Systems Products (ESP).

References

{{reflist 1983 establishments in California 1988 disestablishments in California 1988 mergers and acquisitions American companies established in 1983 American companies disestablished in 1988 Computer companies established in 1983 Computer companies disestablished in 1988 Cray Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct computer systems companies Defunct computer companies based in California Defunct computer companies of the United States Silicon Graphics Sun Microsystems Technology companies based in San Diego