Page "Control Data Corporation" Paragraph 32

CDC decided to fight for the high-performance niche, but Norris recognized that the company had become moribund in his opinion and unable to quickly design competitive machines.

So in 1983, he set up a spinoff company, ETA Systems, whose design goal was a machine processing data at 10 GFLOPs, about 40 times the speed of the Cray-1.

The design never fully matured, and it was unable to reach its goals.

Nevertheless, the product was one of the fastest computers on the market, and 7 liquid nitrogen-cooled and 27 smaller air cooled versions of the computers were sold during the next few years.

They used the new CMOS chips, which produced much less heat.

The effort ended after half-hearted attempts to sell ETA Systems.

In 1989, most of the employees of ETA Systems were laid off, and the remaining ones were folded into CDC.