Editing PERQ (section)

=== PERQ 3 ===
The ''PERQ 3A'' (otherwise known as the ICL 3300 Advanced Graphics Workstation) was developed by ICL as a replacement for the PERQ 2. The PERQ 3A had an all-new hardware architecture based around a 12.5&nbsp;MHz [[Motorola]] [[Motorola 68020|68020]] [[microprocessor]], [[Motorola 68881|68881]] [[floating-point unit]] and 68450 Direct Memory Access Controller, plus two [[AMD 29000|AMD 29116A]] [[32-bit]] [[bit slice]] processors which acted as graphics co-processors. It also had up to 2 MB of RAM, a [[SCSI]] hard disk and was housed in a desktop "mini-tower"-style enclosure. The operating system was a port of [[UNIX System V]] Release 2 called PNX 300.{{citation needed|date=August 2010}} Prototype units were produced in 1985, but the project was cancelled before full production commenced (the project had run late and ICL decided it was a solution provider - it would sell Sun workstations as part of the solution).{{citation needed|date=August 2010}}

Another workstation design under development at the time of the company's demise, the ''PERQ 3B'' was a colour model (sometimes referred to as the ''PERQ 5'') was taken over by [[Crosfield Electronics]] for its Crosfield Studio 9500 [[page layout]] workstation.<ref name="faq"/> The workstation was also known internally as Python, was developed in 1986 jointly by MegaScan and Conner Scelza Associates (both in [[Gibsonia, Pennsylvania|Gibsonia, PA]], U.S.A.) and the Crosfield team (in [[Hemel Hempstead]], England). MegaScan, led by Brian Rosen, developed the workstation electronics and Conner Scelza Associates (led by Jerry Conner and Don Scelza) ported UNIX and wrote all the other supporting software. Crosfield (led by Andrew Chapman) were the overall project managers and had embedded engineers in MegaScan (Simon Butler and Mark Somervail) and Conner Scelza (Roger Willcocks).<ref>[http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/perq/RD_Davis/Davis-PERQ_Workstations_Nov03.pdf PERQ Workstations by R. D. Davis]</ref>

The Crosfield requirement was for a very high performance graphics system (known as Viper, developed by their subsidiary benchMark Technologies) and a large (at the time) amount of disk storage. The Crosfield team in Hemel Hempstead developed an early [[RAID]] solution that supported up to 8 [[SCSI]] controllers operating in parallel with data streaming from 5¼-inch [[full-height]] drives and a fast [[fibre-optic]] network known as GALAN. Prototypes were running in late 1986 in both the US and UK and volume production from Crosfield's [[Peterborough]] factory started early 1987.<ref>[http://www.caffnib.co.uk/xfld_gloss.html A Crosfield Glossary]</ref>