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Elxsi was founded in 1979 by Joe Rizzi and Thampy Thomas . It is believed that Elxsi was the first startup founded by an Indian in Silicon Valley. Much of the architecture of the Elxsi machine was designed by former Stanford University professors Len Shar and Balasubrimanian Kumar. Another key contributor to the design was Harold McFarland, who was also a key designer on the team that created the PDP-11. George Taylor provided a key design for the IEEE floating-point unit.
Elxsi was bought out by Gene Amdahl in 1985 with money that was leftover from the Trilogy venture. Venture investors in Elxsi included Tata Group and Arthur Rock. In 1989, however, Elxsi left the computer business because of the general shift away from the use of mainframes in the global computer industry and the advent of the personal computer. The Tata Group kept the name Tata Elxsi but it now belongs to the Tata group of companies.
The original Elxsi Corporation, however, remained in business as a going concern. In 1989, the company sold its computer maintenance business to National Computer Systems. In 1991, the company entered two entirely different lines of business: restaurants and sewer inspection equipment. ELXSI is still engaged in these businesses, as well as its CUES unit, which makes video pipeline inspection equipment.
Before its withdrawal from the computer industry, the large range of hardware expansion gave the machine some success in departmental technical computing environments. The 64-bit registers and ability to do parallel adds within them gave it an unanticipated advantage in COBOL benchmarks, where it outperformed some mainframes. And the extreme independence of the CPUs , coupled with the ability to lock processes into register sets and later, the ability to partition the caches, gave it some success in real-time applications.
