Amdahl Corporation
More info
- Creator
- Gene Amdahl
- Released
- 1970
- Type
- Mainframe manufacturer
The company that built IBM mainframes faster and cheaper than IBM – founded by the man who had designed them.
Gene Amdahl was chief architect of the IBM System/360, but left IBM in 1970 after being refused a faster machine. His new company sold plug-compatible mainframes: they ran the same operating systems and software as IBM's, so customers could swap the iron without touching the code. The first machine, the 470V/6, shipped in 1975.
Part of the capital came from Fujitsu, which bought the rest of the company in 1997. Amdahl himself is credited with coining "FUD" for the IBM sales technique of scaring customers away from competitors. The parallelism law bearing his name, Amdahl's law, predates the company.