Gould Electronic's PowerNode 6000

The Firebreathers from Gould blast the competition into oblivion.

Company

The history of this company is very complicated. Charles Gould built a foundry in 1895 to make couplers for railroad cars. The company diversified and started making batteries for railcars. In 1928, the company was incorporated as Gould Storage Battery. A couple of years later, Gould began to produce batteries for cars, subways, elevators, and more. They became the main supplier of submarine batteries for the US Navy. They changed their name to Gould Storage Batter Corporation.

Over the years, Gould bought several companies to expand their product lines. In 1981, Gould purchased Systems Engineering Laboratories, a minicomputer manufacturer. Gould was purchased by Nippon Mining in 1988 but had to sell off the divisions that did work for the US Department of Defense. Those portions of Gould were purchased in 1989 by Encore Computer Corporation. At the time, Encore Computer had 250 employees and Gould’s computer division had 2,500 employees.

Over time, Encore sold off several divisions, including the storage group to Sun Microsystems. By 2002, all that remained was their real-time computing assets which were purchased by Compro Computer Services

The Product

Gould introduced the PowerNode 6000 in 1984. The March 19, 1984 issue of ComputerWorld carried the following announcement:

Powernode 6000 operates under Gould’s UTX/32 operating system, which includes features of both Bell Laboratories’ System V and the University of California at Berkeley’s BSD 4.2 versions of Unix. Gould said this Unix-based software can accommodate applications developed for a VAX environment.

The processor was designed for networked and stand-alone multiuser applications and is available in three basic configurations: the PN6030, the PN6050 and the PN6080 dual processor. The units were developed for software development as well as for scientific, engineering, military, aerospace and educational applications.

The Powernode 6000 line is said to process compute-intensive tasks while allowing simultaneous workstation access to data bases. Gould claims the Powernode 6000 has outperformed the VAX-11/780, with the PN6030 and PN6050 operating \Vi to two times faster and the PN6080 performing 2 1/2 to three times faster than the VAX-11/780 using Unix.

The products were designed with the Gould Selbus, which offers a data transfer rate of 26.7M byte/sec. The Selbus is also used in the firm’s larger Concept line of processors.

The June 1, 1984 issue of Computer Design also carried an announcement about the PowerNode 6000.

The 32-bit, Unix-based PowerNode 6000 is available in three versions: the 6030, packaged in a 30-in. tall cabinet with an integrated disk and tape; the 6050, in a 71-in. tall cabinet with ample space for a variety of disks and tapes; and the 6080, with an internal processing unit that handles computation bound tasks for the CPU. The architecture for the series is centered around a high speed bus with a throughput of 26.67 Mbytes/s. A 32-Kbyte, two-way set associative cache increases performance. Prices start at $80,000.

A fact sheet from DataPro Research shows that the PowerNode 6000 line had a price range of $100,000 to $250,000.

Have you ever used any Gould PowerNode 6000 products? Do you know anything about its history? Tell us about it in the comments below.

What computer ads would you like to see in the future? Please comment below. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends and relatives. Thank you.