ICL PERQ
The PERQ, also referred to as the Three Rivers PERQ or ICL PERQ, was a pioneering workstation computer produced in the early 1980s.
The workstation was conceived by six former Carnegie Mellon University alumni and employees, Brian Rosen, Jim Teter, Bill Broadley, Stan Kriz, Raj Reddy and Paul Newbury, who formed the startup Three Rivers Computer Corporation (3RCC) in 1974. Brian Rosen also worked at Xerox PARC on the Dolphin workstation. The PERQ design was influenced by the original workstation computer, the Xerox Alto. It was the first commercially-produced personal workstation, a prototype PERQ being shown at the 1979 SIGGRAPH conference. The origin of the name "PERQ" is from the word perquisite.
As a result of interest from the UK Science Research Council (later, the Science and Engineering Research Council), 3RCC entered into a relationship with the British computer company ICL in 1981 for European distribution, and later co-development and manufacturing. The PERQ was used in a number of academic research projects in the UK during the 1980s.
3RCC was renamed PERQ System Corporation in 1984. It went out of business in 1986, largely due to competition from other workstation manufacturers such as Sun Microsystems, Apollo Computer and Silicon Graphics.
