In 1988, Encore purchased the former
Systems Engineering Laboratories (SEL) from
Nippon Mining. SEL, founded in 1961, built high-performance electronics systems for industrial monitoring and control purposes, and was purchased by
Gould Electronics in 1980; Gould was in turn purchased by Nippon Mining in 1988. SEL computers were used in many military flight simulators; because of US government regulations which forbid foreign companies from owning control of companies providing key components of the national defense, Nippon had to sell SEL. Nippon in essence paid Encore to buy the computer division. Encore then turned, as did most of the market, to
RISC-based CPUs. They chose the
Motorola 88000, and released the
Encore-91 in late 1991, supporting two (9102) or four (9104) CPUs running at 25 MHz. A bottom-up redesign for the new processor led to the
Infinity 90 series, starting with the
Infinity 90/ES in 1994. The ES supported between 2 and 2,045 Motorola
88110 CPUs running at 50 MHz. Several newer machines in the Infinity 90 series were released, but Encore again found its CPU supplier changing direction as Motorola dropped development of the 88000 series to concentrate on the
PowerPC. Trying again, this time in the high-performance real-time market, Encore turned to the
Alpha 21064 to create the
Infinity R/T Model 300, which first shipped in late 1994. By this point the massively parallel market was being encroached on by machines made up of large numbers of commodity machines, and Encore released a single-CPU
workstation running
OSF/1, the
Series 90 RT 3000. It was intended to be used either standalone or as a node in a massively parallel machine. Encore also worked on a modified RISC design known as the
RSX. This was intended to operate in two modes, one as a normal CPU node for clusters, and in a CONCEPT/32 compatibility mode, which emulated earlier custom hardware from the real-time side of the company. Encore continues to offer upgrade paths for their earlier systems, some of which date back to 1975. Parts of the computing side of the company were sold off over the years, with the last major spin-off being their Storage Products Group, sold to
Sun Microsystems in 1997.
Acquisitions Gores Technology Group In 1998, Gores Technology Group acquired Encore, and renamed it "Encore Real-Time Computing". This left the company consisting primarily of their real-time group and the original SEL core, returning to this business niche.
Compro Computer Services In 2002, Compro Computer Services acquired Encore Real-Time Computing, although most of the non-US offices still operate under the Encore name. Compro continues its support of SelBUS-based SEL, Gould, and Encore Real-Time Computing products, and offers an upgrade path with the Legacy Computer Replacement System (LCRS) hardware simulator. A sample Encore Multimax system donated from the
Naval Postgraduate School is in storage at the
Computer History Museum. ==Specifications==