HAL Computer Systems

HAL Computer Systems was a Campbell, CA based computer manufacturer. It was started in 1990 by Andrew Heller, a principal designer of the original IBM RS/6000 architecture. His idea was to build computers based on a RISC architecture for the commercial market. When Fujitsu choose to fund the company, the SPARC architecture was chosen. Since the designers believed that a 64 bit architecture was necessary for the commercial workloads, HAL took the initiative in the definition of Version 9 of that architecture.

By the end of 1993, Heller was pushed out of the company and HAL had become a fully owned subsidiary of Fujitsu.

The company produced multiple generations of computers based on their proprietary Sparc microprocessors. Their microprocessors combined out-of-order execution with mainframe-style reliability features. Their SPARC64-I processor beat out Sun's UltraSPARC-I by a few months to be the first 64-bit Sparc microprocessor to be produced.

Most of the sales of the company went to the Japanese market. Fujitsu closed the company in 2001.