Gene Amdahl

Amdahl was born to immigrant parents of Norwegian and Swedish descent in Flandreau, South Dakota. After serving in the Navy during World War II he completed a degree in engineering physics at South Dakota State University in 1948.

He went on to study theoretical physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under Robert G. Sachs. However, in 1950, Amdahl and Charles H. "Charlie" Davidson, a fellow PhD student in the Department of Physics, approached Prof. Harold A. Peterson with the idea of a digital computer. Amdahl and Davidson gained the support of Peterson and fellow electrical engineering professor Vincent C. Rideout, who encouraged them to build a computer of their unique design. Amdahl completed his doctorate at UW–Madison in 1952 with a thesis titled A Logical Design of an Intermediate Speed Digital Computer and created his first computer, the Wisconsin Integrally Synchronized Computer (WISC). He then went straight from Wisconsin to a position at IBM in June 1952.

Amdahl left his eponymous company in August 1979 to set up Trilogy Systems, together with his son Carl, and Clifford Madden. Trilogy aimed to design a wafer-scale microprocessor for even cheaper mainframes. In contrast to the trouble he had raising development funds for Amdahl Corp, this time there was no issue raising $200 million. The chip development failed within months of the company's $60 million public offering, but the investors told him to keep the money and come up with a new concept. The company then focused on developing its VLSI technology. That effort also failed, but he was again told to keep the money and in 1985, Trilogy merged into Elxsi, a computer maker with its own CPU design. Elxsi also did poorly and Amdahl left in 1989, having already founded his next venture, Andor International, in 1987. Andor hoped to compete in the mid-sized mainframe market, using improved manufacturing techniques developed by one of the company's employees, Robert F. Brown, to make smaller, more efficient machines. Production problems and strong competition led the company into bankruptcy by 1995.

Amdahl co-founded Commercial Data Servers in 1996, again in Sunnyvale, and again developing mainframe-like machines but this time with new super-cooled processor designs and aimed at physically smaller systems. One such machine, from 1997, was the ESP/490 (Enterprise Server Platform/490), an enhancement of IBM's P/390 of the System/390 family. Since then, CDS has changed its name and narrowed its focus. As Xbridge Systems, the company now sells software to scan mainframe datasets and database tables for sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security and other government identification numbers, sensitive medical diagnosis information that can be linked to an individual, and other information such as that needed for electronic discovery.

In November 2004, Amdahl was appointed to the board of advisors of Massively Parallel Technologies.

He died on November 10, 2015, in Palo Alto, California, from pneumonia, six days shy of his 93rd birthday. He had Alzheimer's disease in the last years of his life.