Eh, quite obviously a work in progress...
Tricord
Systems. Inc., founded in April 1987, was a provider of enterprise
servers for large complex networks with business-critical applications.
Tricord is based in Plymouth, Minnesota. Tricord designed, manufactured, marketed and supported the PowerFrame Enterprise Server for use in mission-critical OLTP, OLAP, media and file/print applications running on Microsoft Windows NT and Novell NetWare. PowerFrame systems were characterized by an open systems design with emphasis on systems management, fault tolerance, high performance and scalability with up to eight CPUs.
Tricord became a publicly-traded company in 1993 and is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol TRCD.
Working for Tricord was enlightening. It is not common to get involved in projects where one server handles the workload of 600-1000 users. This was the case when working with Tricord PowerFrame servers.
I joined the company in 1995 prior to that having worked for a Tricord reseller. I was based at Tricord's UK office, but had pan-european responsibilities. As part of those responsibilities I travelled quite a bit. A lot of my time was spent in Eastern and Central Europe, primarily Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Ireland, Sweden and Holland also received regular visits. I visited Tricord's headquarters in Minnesota twice (Minnesota is a very cold place in January!).
Towards the end of 1996 it was obvious that Tricord's financial situation was not good. 12. February 1997 Tricord released its 1996 financial results. At the same time it announced a "Strategy shift from enterprise servers to next generation I/O software technology" and a "reduction in workforce". In fact a 2/3 reduction in workforce. As part of that reduction, all european offices were closed down, and I was given my notice.
Tricord machines were a bit out of the ordinary. Due to their architecture, they could, depending on the kind of workload, often outperform more expensive systems. One particular test showed a 6-CPU Tricord machine beating a 16-CPU Sun SPARCcenter 2000!
What, commodore of
Amiga fame? The games computer company? Yes and no. I started work within
Commodore for the "Commodore Networking Division" located in Copenhagen.
This was a part of Commodore dedicated to networking and nothing else.
We sourced, supplied and supported networking products (such as Novell
NetWare, Olicom Token-Ring cards, Western Digital Ethernet cards etc.)
to the national sales offices around the world.
I managed to effect a "transfer" to the UK office of Commodore where I was until the PC's were dropped. Since I had only been involved in the PC networking side of things, I was made redundant.