Tandem Computers

Tandem Computers was an early manufacturer of fault tolerant computer systems, marketed to the growing number of transaction processing customers who used them for ATMs, banks, stock exchanges and other related needs. Tandem systems used a number of redundant processors and storage devices to supply high-speed "failover" in the case of a hardware failure, an architecture that they called NonStop. Over the two decades from the 1970s into the mid-90s, Tandem systems developed from custom hardware to commodity CPU designs. The company was eventually purchased by Compaq in 1997 in order to give that company with more robust server offerings. Today their software is still known as NonStop, as a divide product line offered by Hewlett-Packard.