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legacy website 1994 |
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CORPORATE HISTORY
Our Genius: Innovation ACC was originally founded in 1970 by three executives of AT&T.
As a technology partnership between several executives who left AT&T shortly after deregulation, American was originally intended to market "Intelligent Picture Phones".
The Company was formed in response to one founder, Jack Shulman, who left the Company in the mid 70's, only to return during the 90's as its head. ACC's Corporate mission?
In 1969 and 1970, over dinner, Jack had pointed out to the heads of AT&T and Bell Labs, that the 'third estate' of computing and telephony, was a 'fusion' of video, sound, graphical imagry, computation, and networking. He also pointed out that "Not many women will want your circa-1963 Picture Phone. The use of two telephone lines to provide video and a third multiplexed channel to supply sound is insufficient, because it does not support multi-casting or multi-pointing without a massive increase in the intelligent use of the communications channels, more bandwidth than we can transmit along Company circuits, and collateral intelligence in the operation of the Picture Phone, making it more of a Conferencing Phone than just a TV that talks."
"And, worse, when the Picture Phone rings, what American Woman in her right mind will immediately run and pick it up. It intrudes into her space, her home where she reserves the right to relax, deal with the stresses of daily life, her family, her work, and to let down her hair. Ask any woman: would you want to answer the Picture Phone the first thing in the morning, before you've had a chance to prepare for your day? She'll answer you NO."
And so, as if in anticipation of the needs identified by this simple commentary, American Computer Company was born, first as a limited partnership to develop the communications infrastructure neccessary for networking, and the computational models for personalizing intelligent computers, then as a research company developing designs aimed at reducing the cost of the 'Intelligent Picture Phone', or, as we know it now, The Personal Computer.
In 1978, designs for patents, led to a discovery that what we know as the Personal Computer "AT" or "ATX", represented the most 'common' mix of components necessary, and over time, the operating systems and internetworking channels have evolved.
Today American leads in the development of advanced PC systems. Systems are assembled in the USA from the finest parts available in the world, and engineered not to come apart, with minimum lifespans by design: 50,000 hours of continuous use. We are also known for the extreme innovativeness of our research staff.
Our Chief Technical Officer invented the innovative design for ODIN®, the world's very first Overlapping Windowed Graphical User Interface. ODIN, conceived in 1969, was first demonstrated in late 1973 and early 1974, long before Xerox's Alto Net Star and Dolphin Display Managers. ODIN was the forerunner of today's Windowed operating systems. It had all the basics: overlapping windowed viewing areas, graphical, text and mixed mode editing pads, processor threaded streams, hypertextual links, and programmable interface.
It was originally written for the UNIX® operating system, later for computers running the BASIC language, like the Wang 2200.
ODIN captivated the mind's eye and nearly the entire computer world in 1974 and 1975 when a commercial package using its advanced display concepts was first demonstrated to the public. The first commercially successful windowing system was adapted for Citibank, NA in a product called the "Federal Funds Trading System". Its powerful ability to simultaneously display automated money position, trading slips with correspondent banks and clearing houses, and engage in real time update of monetary placements with the Federal Reserve System opened up a new dimension in desktop application computers. Its designer went on to expand his consulting and computer design business and, over the past two decades, it became American Computer Company.
The World's First WINDOWs on a Personal Computer
but the machines weren't personal enough.Jack Shulman was haunted by the performance demands of advanced graphical user interfaces, he devised several families of desktop computers and CAD/CAM workstations during the latter part of the 70's and early 80's, including the Genius Workstation and the Garment Design Computer. The GDC's design was integrated by IBM Corporation but being very costly, a streamlined version without many of the systems features was introduced as the PC and the PC Jr in 1981. The PC gave way to the PC/AT which closely resembled the GDC, and subsequent technological advances such as MCA, VESA and PCI have heralded a desktop computer, today's Pentium PC, which have just begun to equal American's original designs of 1979 and 1980.
Since that time, American was instrumental in designing 32, 64, and 96 bit wide memory architectures. These new concepts were used by the major semiconductor manufacturers (today's Pentium, for instance, uses 32 and 64 bit wide data transfer architecture and can support in the future, 128 and 256 bit wide bus technology with only minor modification - each doubling of bus width provides for a possible reduction by 1/2 of one of the characteristic limitations of Turing Architecture computers - transfer bus capacity).
To achieve even greater performance, our chief scientist designed advanced servers that used massive parallelism in the late 70's, during the 80's and into the 90's. An advocate of the power of parallel and "mas par" (massively parallel) processing, his designs use advanced parallelism to ensure that no delays occur during events that must occur concurrently.
During that time period, the scientific founder also designed advanced deskside and desktop workstations under contract. Two of his designs were licensed by venture capital firms to Apollo Computer, and Sun Microsystems. A development effort intended originally for IBM as the "office of the future" yielded another design which was later licensed and resold by Apple Computer.
These advanced design concepts were based on desktop systems extended into cooperative networks (today's "workgroups"). The technical studies he performed described and defined architectures which derived benefit from the capabilities of microprocessors which combine the features of Reduced Instruction Set, and Complex Instruction Set, RISC and CISC computing. The machine designs reflect the need for advanced Pipelining, multi-directional, multi-dimensional shared transfer buffers and new parallel and multi-processor architectures.
Our Pentium notebooks have been in the marketplace since 1992. Most companies just started building Pentium laptops in 1995. Our advanced position in technology enables us to field prove a product BEFORE you buy it - and ensures that what you purchase from American Computer won't be obsolete when you first purchase it.
To quote Bill Gates of the Microsoft Corporation, a "quiet revolution in computing" took place in the 80's and 90's, one which has displaced the central mainframe and which has moved into our homes, our schools, our offices and our industry, making more jobs more enjoyable, and improving our abilities, without depriving us of our will or our intelligence. American Computer is proud to have aboard one of the original silent partners in the revolution.
American today delivers Pentium II systems based on single, dual and soon, quad CPU designs.
And at our Lookout Mountain Development Center, hidden away near the Watchung Mountains of middle New Jersey, American Computer is devising an entirely new future systems architecture, code named "ShadowLake", which was announced late in 1996.
Shadowlake's first SuperComputer is used today to perform Weather Tracking by an independent research company in New Jersey. It was given the formal name "Valkyrie", and a model designation, "XB/70", after the experimental bomber developed by North American Aviation.
And, ACC is presently developing its successor: Valkyrie II, based on a massive integration of Intel Pentium II XEON CPUs, grouped in 8-way and 16-way Crossbar Clusters, interconnected by a Twisted Double Helix Limited Distance Architecture Network Bus.
Additionally, ACC is working on a new SuperComputer Semiconductor, based on advanced Electron Trapping Dielectric Junctions. These devices, called Transfer Capacitors, or TCAPs (transcaps) for short, were discovered by Jack Shulman, ACC's CEO and Chief Scientist. They are capable of breaking the 2 GigaHerz speed barrier, and reaching as fast speeds as 1/4 the time it takes for an Electron to rotate around the Nucleus of a Silver Atom. This speed, 1/2 of 1 Millionth of 1 Billionth of a Second, is the time it takes for Silver Hydride Alkane, a substance bordering on the conductive state, an insulator, to become 'excited', and thereby nearly INSTANTLY CHANGE to the conductivity state. Such a function is called a 'Molecular State Switch', which can be used as a building block to implement Fast Integrated Circuits. ACC has experimentally created an Accumulator Chip it calls the TCAP, which can add, subtract, multiply or divide at rates so fast, ACC is unable to calculate them, except for the fact that testing has yielded a basic Integer Add time of approximately Eight (8) One Millionths of a Billionth of a Second.
A Small, Simple bit-Slice Computer, nicknamed "Proteus II" is planned, which if the experimental evidence so far uncovered is any indicator of its potential speed, could yield a computer microchip capable of 125 Trillion Instructions Per Second on a SINGLE SMALL CHIP 1" Square which could sell to the public for about $500. Yet the TCAP P-II would about 39 times the speed of IBM's LARGEST SUPERCOMPUTERS (and IBM's Largest, Pacific Blue, has hundreds of conventional boards inside of it and fills half a room and cost millions to build). And, of course, building one with thousands of Proteus II chips in it, would yeild a computer of unimaginable speed.
Product Perfection: A 5 Year Warranty
American Computer's standard 5 year factory warranty leads the computer industry in system reliability by leveraging experienced manufacturing personnel and quality assurance know-how. All American computers are designed to the highest tolerances for unequalled system performance. Important capabilities such as advanced full screen 3D MPEG video acceleration, TV Input and Output, 128 Bit optional Video and 64-Bit AGP-2 Video operation are standard for all 1998/99 American Computers equipped with the INTEL PCI-bus. 
ODIN ® The First Windowed Graphical User Interface (GUI)-- introduced in 1974
American Computer has introduced an entirely new approach: Open-PC Plug and Play System Design for Windows 98, 95, NT, and Windows 2000, for Solaris, for Novell Netware, for OS/2, for UNIX, LINUX and for SCO UNIX, all new systems for 1998! And, in keeping with that standard: the NEW Apollo Professional Workstation. A system offering choice of q-SMP (Quadraspheric Symmetrical Multiprocessing) models and uniprocessor models. Apollo W-Stations (uniprocessor), Q-Stations and Q-Servers (which provide up to 16 internal Pentium or Pentium II XEON CPUs from 90 to 266 MHz apiece) support SDRAM RAM, choice of 20 to 1 GB/Second Ethernet and UltraDMA or ULTRA SCSI/FW Hard Drives, RAID(s), 17 and 21 inch monitors - all for $559 and up!
Sheer Perfection, Open Systems, and now: Anaconda! Imagine all the power of a Sun SuperSparc Station, Silicon Graphics Indigo or Motorola Power PC, in fact several of them, all the power of most mainframes, and then some, right at your finger tips! Think of all of the applications and ease of interoperability of an Intel Architecture computer - just one with an aggregate performance rate of upto 8 GHz! A Station or Server of that performance providing from MS Office to ANSI Cobol applications which run faster than CICS ever did, from PowerBuilder to Oracle databases that can retrieve at rates that equal or exceed "Pacific Blue", Q-Servers in a complex as large as one can imagine, from Microstation CAD to SAS Statistics to Peachtree Accounting to AI with MicroProlog, all while giving an IBM ES/9000 Mainframe a run for a whole lot less than its money, and offering similar solutions, like DB2 and SQL Server!
And the Q-Systems come with plenty of expansion slots to add Array Processors, Digitial and Industrial Signal Interfaces, Ultra High Speed Communications, Large Scale Telephony Control Units, Advanced Video, the limitless applicability boggles the mind! The POWER of THE Q ® is as useful to NASA as it is to an Insurance Company as it is the LAN management, as it is to anyone needing something better, faster, stronger, more capable.
Why spend millions on yesteryear's legacy, when you can spend tens of thousands achieving the very same goal with today's technology? The objective is to make Plug and Play not only a reality - but to allow businesses to use their capital wisely and on things that they really need. Not waste them on perpetuating a mythology that mainframe manufacturers have contrived - while utterly unable to live up to such myths.
Here's where the mainframe companies led us (e.g.: down the golden path of blissfully ignorant mainframe mythology - the data center being responsible for all aspects of enterprise wide integrity...) -- the daily company-wide system crashes, the "big iron" computer and its constant demand for field service and systems programming, the expensive maintenance and overhauls, constant need for coordinated system and network "Gen's", imposing rules which led to departments and divisions feeling that they were being run BY the Data Center, the massive raised floor and air conditioned data center, the expensive obstacle to rapid change in our business strategies, the intense bureaucracy of the MIS area that led companies so far down the road from where they should have been that many went out of business. The legacy of the mainframe and common mainframe methodologies should rapidly become just a bad memory, in time. Mainframes can be replaced easily by our adaptive microcomputer componentry and restructuring and sizing of applications using client-server, middleware and distributive processing. The Day of the Mainframe has passed as has the baton: the lower overall cost and greater overall power of distribution coupled with new Intranet and data sharing technologies will gradually free us of the Mainframe's over-burdensome, demanding grip.
American Eagle® PC circa 1993,
first introduced in 1979
BEFORE the IBM PC!By design, all American Computer PC products can be configured with virtually any valid combination of Open-PC features and are usually built after time of order, ensuring that the product has the most recent engineering features. Buyers no longer have to settle for the deceptive sales practices of competitors of American Computer, competitors that pre-build stale, pre-configured systems in overseas locations using low cost, low reliability labor. American's practice of building systems to order in the U.S. not only reduces cost by minimizing our on-hand inventory, it enables our customers to choose from many advanced options. Our systems options include Advanced Multimedia, a wide variety of CD-ROM drive options, a wide choice of modems, LAN and Internet interconnects.
Pentium PCI MULTIMEDIA Laptops AND... Our new American Panther PCI Multimedia Pentium Laptop PCs are available with 12.1", 13.3", 14.1" and 15.1" TFT Color Active Matrix and Dual Scan Color displays and choice of Lithium Ion or Nickel Metal Hydride batteries... We've been offering Pentium notebooks for over six years, while some competitors are just bringing theirs to market! Our PC Open Systems' options include a complete choice of cabinetry and Stereo Multi Fidelity Audio - 30, 80, 120 and 250 Watt Stereo Audio combined with 15", 17", 19", 21" or 29" American EagleVision displays and optional overhead projectors ... Nearly limitless Hard Disk Drive capacities and RAM (EDO RAM and Sync Burst Cache are optional) expansion up to 1 GB makes American's Eagles, Jaguars, Anacondas, and Panthers configurable for any modern computing task!
American's full family of Pentium III, M-II, K6, K6/2, K6/3, K7, PENTIUM II, Pentium Pro, and Pentium II Xeon based PCs, Workstations and Servers are used in commercial, home and government applications throughout the world. Now, brand new, built-to-order systems may be ordered and shipped to our home or office within a few days! And, customers can order ENTIRE LOCAL AREA NETWORKS or upgrades to existing ones -- American's skilled installers will provide everything neccessary from the wire and cable to the File Servers and the CD-Towers!
Leasing and on-site service is provided worldwide! The following is a sample of product from our catalog. E-MAIL us for more information using one of the EMAIL links at the bottom of this page, or fill out the price quote form linked throughout this Web Site.
But, most of all, have fun! American Computer Company believes that its computers should be easy and fun to use, that personal computing is intended to enliven one's quality of life and increase one's ability to function when working on the job.
So: enjoy and let American Computer Company make your personal computer for you! ®
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Copyright © 1970-1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 AMERICAN COMPUTER COMPANY - All Rights Reserved.
"American Eagle", "Eagle Server", "American Panther", "Panther Server", "Panther MPC", "American Apollo", "Apollo Professional", "American Apollo 'Q' Workstations", "Anaconda","Power*2","Eagle*2", "The Power of the Q" as applied to computers and computer components, "Client Classifieds" and "American Supercomputer" are the registered trademarks of American Computer Company. These terms may not be used without the express permission of the Company. All information is subject to change without prior notice. Some configurations may vary slightly from description.
This site-concept has been developed by the Network Solutions Group at AMERICAN COMPUTER COMPANY.
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