User:LAKBoston/draftHendrie

Gardner C. Hendrie is a Special Limited Partner with Sigma Partners, a Venture Capital firm.

Gardner joined Sigma in 1985. Prior to joining Sigma, he was in the computer systems business for 30 years. Gardner fostered the strong belief in operational fundamentals as an essential part of the Sigma culture. He has helped many Sigma portfolio companies refine their business fundamentals in order to avoid common mistakes on their road to success. At Sigma he has been responsible for investments in Argon Networks, Atria Software, Cascade Communications, Chipcom, Epoch Systems, GeoTel Communications, Synernetics, Wellfleet Communications and Xyplex, among others.

One of Gardner’s accomplishments was his work on the DDP-116 minicomputer, introduced by the Computer Control Company (also called 3C, and later bought by Honeywell) in April of 1965. This was actually the first commercial 16-bit minicomputer to hit the market.

In 1980, he was one of the three founders of Stratus Computer, Inc., where he was responsible for hardware development on the first commercial fault tolerant computer system that did not rely on complex software for fault detection and recovery. Stratus’ fault-tolerant servers are chosen by banks, financial institutions, national defense, telephone networks, and stock exchanges to run software applications that must never fail to stay up and running all the time. Prior to founding Stratus, he was with Data General, where he designed the first commercial single chip, 16-bit microprocessor, the microNova.

Gardner was also responsible for hardware engineering relating to all small and intermediate processors, communications subsystems, digital/analog input/output subsystems, terminals, memories, and power supplies. Earlier in his career, he worked at Computer Control Company, and after it was acquired, at Honeywell, Inc. At Computer Control, he was responsible for the conception and design of the world’s first 16-bit minicomputer, the DDP 116. His responsibilities included engineering as well as product management for the minicomputer product line. Gardner has also held engineering, advanced development, and product planning positions at Foxboro Corp. and RCA.

He received degrees in physics from Harvard (B.A.) and the University of Pennsylvania (M.S.).

Gardner is a trustee at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA and the Boston Lyric Opera in Boston, MA.

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