Floating Point Systems

Floating Point Systems Inc. (FPS) was a Beaverton, Oregon vendor of minisupercomputers. The company was founded in 1970 by former Tektronix engineer Norm Winningstad. The original goal of the company was to supply floating point coprocessors for minicomputers. In 1976, the AP-120B array processor was produced. This was soon followed by a larger FPS AP-190. In 1981, the follow-on FPS-164 was produced, followed by its big brother, the 264 having the same architecture. This was 5 times faster using ECL instead of TTL chips. In 1988, FPS acquired the assets of Celerity Computing of San Diego, California, renaming itself as FPS Computing. Celerity's product lines were further developed by FPS, the Celerity 6000 minisupercomputer being developed into the FPS Model 500 series. They later became the S-MP and APP product lines of Cray Research when FPS was acquired by that larger company in 1991 for $3.25 million.