InfoAge received a working Amdahl 5890 from AT&T (Was powered down by it's operations team, packed and and delivered to Camp Evans). It was "accidentally" destroyed and scrapped out during the BRAC process at Camp Evans Have a PDF of the web page if anyone wants more information... Some 5890 Specifications: On 1/16/2022 4:27 PM, Adam Michlin via vcf-midatlantic wrote:

Hi Everyone,

As some of you know, my father worked at Amdahl from 1984 to 1993. He held many roles, including Product Planning. Director of Design Automation, and ultimately Director of Storage, before moving on to other things.

He has a t-shirt that was produced for internal usage only (it was not traditional swag) that Dean Notarnicola was kind enough to scan and Javier Rivera was kind enough to clean up for reprinting. Javier is also making it available for purchase, although neither Dean nor I receive any funds. I absolutely love Javier's store (check it out even if you aren't interested in Amdahl!) and look at it as my small contribution to support him. My only concern was making sure the history lived on.

Here's the t-shirt:

https://www.8bittees.com/product/amdahl-5990-tee/

And here's the history behind the shirt in my father's own words (although we're still trying to figure out the significance of the bees):

--- The Story of the Amdahl 5990

During the 1970s era it took roughly 7 years from the time a mainframe project was initiated until the product actually shipped to customers. The technology of the time required advancing the semiconductors, then advancing the packaging and cooling, then advancing the architecture based on them, then tuning an operating system to support them and finally going through a tortuous bring-up and test process to assure that the mainframe – at prices ranging from $1 million or so up to perhaps $9-10 million – didn’t fail in embarrassing ways on a customer’s data center.

This 7-year cycle applied to both IBM itself and Amdahl, its major plug-compatible competitor, and both knew it. Therefore each felt fairly secure in the competition to market their high end mainframes without fear of any short term surprises.

But Amdahl was a partner, both technologically and financially with Fujitsu, a Japanese company. Fujitsu was offering mainframes of its own design under its own brand. They were sold mostly in the Japanese market and didn’t compete with IBM products as directly as Amdahl did. If Fujitsu needed to field a product directly competing with IBM, it offered an Amdahl.

Japanese mainframe users often valued fast numerical (floating point) performance for scientific programs, and Fujitsu tended to design with this in mind. By contrast, American users were running more commercially oriented workloads, and IBM was known for designing to this requirement. Amdahl’s key competitive claim was high performance for various workloads including both scientific and commercial.

So it came to pass that Fujitsu was well along in developing its next mainframe at a time when Amdahl and IBM were each only a year or two into their 7-year cycle. On a visit to Japan, Amdahl engineers learned about the coming Fujitsu product and decided that with some work to make it meet Amdahl’s “100% IBM plug-compatible” promise, it could compete with IBM in the U.S.

And it would be a huge surprise since it would enter the market years before anyone expected a new, higher performance product from Amdahl, or IBM. As a result, it was treated as a top secret within Amdahl and quietly perfected under the code name “Hawk.” As it progressed from an engineering project toward seeing the light of day as a full fledged Amdahl product, it looked more and more promising, and secrecy became more and more critical. At one point as the code name “Hawk” seemed to be leaking, the project name was changed to “Lynx.”

The rest is history. Hawk/Lynx was announced and shipped as the Amdahl model 5990. It was a big surprise to IBM and a market success, especially for scientific users.

As a memento of the project, participants received a custom T-shirt, a common Silicon Valley tradition. The words on this T-shirt said “Amdahl 5990,” and the image combined a bird of prey – a Hawk – and a Lynx – a relatively large and wild bobcat. And those who had worked on the secret project knew exactly what it referred to.

JM: 1/10/2022 ---

Best wishes,

-Adam