Ridge Computers, Inc., was an American computer manufacturer active from 1980 to 1990. The company began as a builder of deskside workstations and workgroup servers and progressed to superminicomputers. They claimed to have produced the first commercially available Reduced instruction set computer (RISC) systems.
Company history
Ridge Computers was established in May 1980 in Santa Clara, California by six original founders, five of whom had come from Hewlett Packard (HP), and one from Zilog.
The company was named for the Montebello Ridge, where two of the founders used to go cycling.
Ridge's first prototype was running by autumn 1981, and entered beta testing one and a half years later in early 1983. The system was presented at the Comdex show in autumn 1983. The earliest CPUs were bit slice processors built from "Fast" ("F" infix) type 7400-series integrated circuits and Programmable Array Logic (PAL) devices.
The Ridge CPU's qualification as a RISC design has been challenged due to its use of variable length instructions, multiple-cycle instruction decode, microcoded control store, and relatively rich instruction set, with over 100 instructions. Other sources reaffirm the Ridge's RISC bona fides.
Ridge faced competition not only from Digital Equipment Corporation's popular VAX-11, but also from other early RISC adopters Celerity Computing and Pyramid Technology, the latter of which began shipping systems in March 1984.
Although considered closer in configuration and capability to contemporary workstations, Ridge described their early systems as "personal mainframes". Their original target market was designers and engineers running scientific and technical applications, including computer-aided design, computer imaging and animation, and scientific research. A significant customer was Pacific Data Images, who switched from DEC VAXen to Ridge 32s, reporting a doubling of performance.
In the early 1980s, the French government was negotiating cooperative technology agreements between French and foreign companies. Also around this time, Jacques Stern, newly installed Director and CEO of Groupe Bull, became interested in adding RISC-based products to his company's offerings. Bull finalized an agreement to share technologies with both Convergent Technologies and Ridge Computers.
Around September 1985, Ridge named Robert J. Kunze, of Hambrecht & Quist Group and Hambrecht & Quist Venture Partners, to their Board of Directors.
In the mid-1980s Ridge began to experience financial difficulties. In early 1986 the company was refinanced, receiving US$1,000,000 out of a planned US$10,000,000 from Hambrecht & Quist, and Groupe Bull. Bob O. Evans, a general partner in Hambrecht & Quist, was appointed chief executive officer.
In mid-1986, Ridge launched an Academic discount program in the UK similar to a program they had already established in the US.
In 1987 Ridge and Apollo Computer entered into a joint marketing agreement that promoted a hybrid configuration of Apollo workstations networked to a Ridge supermini.
By the late 1980s Ridge realized that unless they implemented their architecture in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) semiconductor technology, it would become uncompetitive. While some experimental CPUs were produced using gate array technology from Fujitsu, no VLSI-based systems were shipped.
In early 1988, Ridge underwent a restructuring that saw a 45% reduction in personnel, Michael Preletz installed as CEO, and a new focus on commercial sales, while delivery of the new CPU for the 5100 model was further delayed. Ridge was dissolved in April 1990.
Reports of the number of systems sold by Ridge Computers vary from four hundred to six hundred units. Several hundred others were manufactured and sold under license by Bull. The total system count has been estimated to have been one thousand systems.
Although not a product of Ridge Computers, the Cerberus multiprocessor simulator used a processor model with an instruction set architecture derived from that of the Ridge 32's CPU.
People
At their peak, Ridge employed about one hundred fifty people. The founders and some former employees are listed below: