What is this new BiiN company formed as a 50-50 joint venture between Intel Corp and Siemens AG (CI No 944)? The answer seems likely to lie in a little-publicised five-year development agreement signed between the two companies in April 1984. Under that agreement, Siemens was to to put up $80m over five years and contribute 100 engineers – the source of funds being its Power Engineering Group – and Intel would second 40 to 60 engineers to the project and give it space at its Hillsboro, Oregon base. The purpose of the project, code-named Gemini, was to develop a second generation of the Intel iAPX-432 object-oriented chip set, and under the project name P7, develop a family of microcomputers around it. Although way ahead of its time, the 432 was stymied by design faults that meant it performed below the design specification, and insufficent software development tools. It was designed to run the Ada military and real-time programming language efficiently, and most enthusiasm for the part initially came from digital PABX manufacturers, although all ultimately abandoned it either because it was too slow, or, in more cases, because it was too difficult to program. The ultimate aim of the Siemens-Intel project was to develop a range of powerful computers aimed at fault-tolerant multiprocessing and embedded real-time applications, at that time running an enhanced version of the iMAX operating system that was developed for the 432, though that may now have given way to Unix. Very little has been heard from the programme since it was announced, but at the time, observers were saying that the first machines were likely to appear in 1988 – which ties in with the inauguration of BiiN.
