In another setback for Motorola Inc’s 88000 RISC, Bolt, Beranek & Newman Inc has thrown in the towel on its highly regarded but deeply unprofitable parallel processor effort and has abandoned its development of the next generation machine and closed down its BBN Advanced Computers Inc unit. It says all but a handful of the 50 employees will be offered work in other parts of the company and that it will continue to seek research and development contracts in parallel processing. It will still seek to license its software and seek consultancy contracts. Annual sales of the Butterfly and T-2000 never exceeded $10m to $12m, giving the company only a small share of the parallel processing market that International Data Corp estimates to be worth a modest $154m all told. According to the Wall Street Journal, Thinking Machines Corp is the parallel computer market leader with a 39% share and Intel Corp is in second place with 19.5%.
