Talk:Tandem Computers

the present
The whole article is almost entirely just the past history of Tandem, which is understandable, but it should have a section about the present. Ratbert42 02:37, 20 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Considering that Tandem has not existed as a company since being bought out by Compaq (1999?), and that Compaq itself was purchased by HP in 2002, I think the information provided here is sufficient. 68.94.213.153 13:56, 17 February 2007 (UTC)


 * The Compaq purchase of Tandem Computers was announced on June 21 of 1997. Art Rice 14:48, 27 August 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by ArtR001 (talk • contribs)


 * Considering that Hewlett-Packard is still selling NonStop machines, only the 'Tandem' references should be in the past tense. jmcw (talk) 17:06, 1 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Considering that this is an article on "Tandem Computers", the defunct company, and not "NonStop platform", past tense is perfectly fine. 207.11.1.161 (talk) 16:04, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

failure rate of other systems
The following reads like unsubstantiated marketing literature: "While conventional systems of the era, including mainframes, had failure rates on the order of a few days". Ratbert42 02:37, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

This reads like marketing literature too: " this "shared-nothing" messaging system design also scales extremely well to the largest commercial workloads"

That's only true if the workload is already parallel. You can't take any given workload and any given CPU architecture and _remove_ shared memory and see a speed-up. It sounds like Tandem's advantage is _having_ that reliable bus and memory rollback feature, not _lacking_ shared memory. 99.130.69.59 (talk) 19:49, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

software-only
The following sentence from this article is COMPLETELY false and erroneous:

Over the two decades from the 1970s into the mid-90s, Tandem systems evolved into software-only solutions running on other platforms.

Tandem systems CANNOT be implemented to run on other platforms. They can be implemented using commodity microprocessors -- and much cooperation with INTEL has led to the inclusion at the hardware level of key features necessary to use Itanium Processors in Tandem systems.

HP NonStop Servers are the ONLY hardware platform able to support the NonStop Kernel Operating System (formerly known as Guardian).

FYI, Jay Van Dwingelen, former employee of Tandem Computers for 21+ years. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.107.147.63 (talk • contribs) 23:06, 15 August 2003 (UTC)

Not true - see — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.117.28.107 (talk • contribs) 00:58, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

other suggestions
I recall that in the beginning HP refused the nonstop-fault-tolerant concept and that is why the engineers left HP to startup Tandem. If this is true, this should be inserted into the article.

Also mention of competitors in this area would be nice, Sequent, Stratus, IBM...others?

The article also mentions that, Himalaya and S-Series are the same... I thought they were different systems.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 198.96.43.80 (talk • contribs) 5 August 2004 (UTC)

They are different. Himalaya used a Bus type architecture. S-Series utilizes ServerNet Art Rice 14:51, 27 August 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by ArtR001 (talk • contribs)

HP refused to develop the concept
(part of the previous section)

Yes, this is true. I'm a little hazy about the details, but in the early 70s an HP team did a proposal for a Dutch company for a more robust system than HP's current offerings. The people involved were Horst Enzelmueller, Josef Broeker and [damn! I've forgotten his name, just remember his face] (it was Jürgen Krüper, CW), all from HP in Frankfurt, Germany. They later became the CEO, software support manager and hardware support manager for Tandem Computers Germany, thus explaining why Germany was the first place outside the USA to have a Tandem subsidiary. My recollection, which I'll research, is that HP wasn't interested in their idea, so along with colleagues in the USA, notably Jimmy Treybig and Dave Mackie, they developed their own architecture and company. Groogle 05:44, 23 February 2007 (UTC) (Tandem customer 1977-1982, then employee 1982-1992)

Integrity series
The information on this page is very inaccurate. The Integrity series was originally a competitive offering to the T/16 architecture, developed in Austin TX, and it ran a version of MIPS UNIX. The first product was the S2 in 1989. Some time in the mid-90s they ported Guardian (sorry, NSK) to the hardware and introduced the S7000. The S4000 carried on with UNIX.

All this is off the top of my head, so I'm putting it here rather than in the main article. If anybody wants to build on it, feel free. Groogle 05:59, 23 February 2007 (UTC)


 * The article said Integity was introduced in 1990, so I've changed that to 1989. Otherwise, I don't see inaccuracies; the article fits with what you've written above, although with slightly less detail. -R. S. Shaw 19:02, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

The 1992 CLX clock crash
Might be nice to add something about the famous 1992 CLX clock crash. Starting in New Zealand all CLX machines started to crash as 3 p.m on November 1, 1992 rolled around the world. Tandem struggled to find the cause, eventually discovering and fixing a microcode bug before the crash reached the European time zone. ref http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/cal.html HughesJohn (talk) 12:48, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Improving References
Added an Ri tag since this article has next to nothing for references. I did dig up the old Tandem website on the Wayback Machine at http://web.archive.org/web/19961230182819/http://www.tandem.com/ which might be a start to at least referencing the systems. MailOrderYaks (talk) 01:59, 13 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Also, while digging through the old revisions I found this file http://research.microsoft.com/~gray/papers/TandemTR86.2_FaultToleranceInTandemComputerSystems.doc which seems to contain a lot of information that is now unreferenced. MailOrderYaks (talk) 02:49, 13 March 2009 (UTC)


 * The Computer Business Review has news archives with articles about Tandem which can be found be using the search facility. Rilak (talk) 05:25, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

NonStop Fajitas
Not that it belongs in the story, but having worked at Tandem HQ in 87-88, I recall that the TGIF's restaurant next door to the HQ (across from Vallco Fashion Park Mall) started offering "NonStop® Fajitas"... essentially, unlimited fajitas for a fixed price. I thought it very clever of them. -- Randal L. Schwartz (talk) 04:11, 28 August 2010 (UTC)

3 janauary
availability edit was a good thing to add?! Please can anyone inspect this....Super48paul (talk) 12:02, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

"Culture" section neutrality issues
The "Culture" section is rather lengthy for an encyclopedic article and has some neutrality issues. It could probably be shortened a bit as well. Bumm13 (talk) 04:07, 15 September 2013 (UTC)


 * In the article, the paragraph has been deleted because of lack of sources. I understand, but however, it was true, I try it as French customer. But I dont have documents about that. --Tangopaso (talk) 11:05, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

My edit of 2016-08-08
My edit of 2016-08-08 got reverted. I understand the comment that was made on the reversion, which means that I shouldn't have used the word "components". However, as previously written (and now, as reverted), the sentence doesn't seem grammatical to me. It says '... toughened systems that used redundant but usually required "hot spares".' Used redundant *what*?

I guess there is a possible interpretation in which "but usually required" as an adjectival phrase, so the meaning it "toughened systems that used hot spares that were redundant but usually required". However, if this is the meaning, it's extremely clunky, and I would argue that the sentence needs to be rewritten. As a minimum, some commas would be useful: '... toughened systems that used redundant, but usually required, "hot spares".' But I don<t want to make this change, because I'm not sure if this is what is meant, or if there is simply a word missing where I had inserted "components".

STeamTraen (talk) 17:21, 17 August 2016 (UTC)