In 1985 Ardent Computer was determined to create a market niche
for personal supercomputers. To understand our potential
markets, we started by analyzing the marketing literature from
Cray Research then crisscrossed the country talking to
prospective customers – scientists and researchers in advanced
corporate R&D centers and universities – to understand their
needs. A week might start with a visit to the MIT Media Lab, the
next day at Princeton in the Aerospace Engineering department,
then off to General Motors’ advanced research group, across to
the computer science department at the University of Illinois,
up to Minneapolis to meet with ETA, Control Data and Cray, and
across the country to Seattle to speak with Boeing’s advanced
propulsion group before returning to to the geophysics
department at Stanford. After six months, we hypothesized that
our most likely customers were scientists and engineers who used
one of five applications: computational fluid dynamics, finite
element analysis, computational chem