GRI

[Chuck Guzis]

On 12 Nov 2009 at 19:10, William Donzelli wrote:

> > GRI--Newton, Mass--I thought, was a firm not affiliated with anyone.
> 
> The advert in an old Datamation has the fine print "part of GR
> Industries".
> 
> GenRad at the time was an almost sunken ship (there is such a thing as
> being too conservative in the test equipment market!), and I have to
> think it was a mad attempt to bail out the water.

Will, I think it's the wrong "GR", but an interesting story.  From

 http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/arch/risc/

"Sidenote: Saul Dinman explained in 2003 that GRI was originally 
General Research Corporation, a private Massachussetts company; when 
it went public, it had name conflicts with a pre-existing General 
Research, and then with General Radio as it hunted for a non-
conflicting name. Under the name GRI, the company was eventually 
acquired by venture capitalists in North Carolina, and then by a 
display manufacturer that wanted to buy their OEM supplier, and 
finally by Analog Devices. The GRI processor architecture was one of 
the first bus-oriented architectures built using a printed-circuit 
backplane. Thousands of GRI-909 systems were sold on an OEM basis, 
mostly in the industrial control sector. Had marketing and 
capitalization worked out differently, the GRI-909 might have been an 
effective competitor for the Data General Nova, another DEC spinoff."

So I guess that any remnants of GRI might be in AD's archives...

Cheers,
Chuck