When he was at Cray Research Inc, Dr Steve Chen was famously described as having such a strong not-invented-here mentality that when designing his supercomputers, it was said that he wanted to start with the sand from which the silicon for the chips were made. So when his own Supercomputer Systems Inc venture failed and he was reduced to creating a Chen Systems Inc that would build two- to eight-way multiprocessor servers out of 133MHz Pentiums (CI No 2,761), his heart was clearly not really in it. Nine months after launching the superservers, which were claimed to apply principles of parallelism and in-system switching developed for supercomputers, the Eau Claire, Wisconsin company has thrown in the towel and signed a letter of intent to sell the server business to Sequent Computer Systems Inc. Sequent will pay $2m cash and 300,000 warrants for Sequent shares at $21.50 a time to the remaining Chen shareholders. It is only buying the hardware assets, and a vestigial Chen Systems software company will remain, although Sequent has licensed the software too. It takes on Dr Chen as its new chief technology officer, along with his 30-strong engineering team. Ironically, given Steve Chen’s background, Sequent sees the deal as a means of expanding from its high-end server business into the mid-range and entry-level enterprise server market. running both UnixWare and Windows NT.
