to optimize the performance of IBM's MVS operating system when running under IBM's VM operating system. By 1979, Amdahl Corporation had sold over US$1 billion of V6 and V7 mainframes and had over 6,000 employees worldwide. The corporation went on to distribute an IBM-plug-compatible front-end processor (the 4705) as well as high-performance disk drives, both jointly developed with Fujitsu engineers. At the 1967 Spring Joint Computer Conference, Amdahl, along with three other computer architects, most notably ILLIAC IV architect Daniel Slotnick, engaged in a discussion on future architectural trends. Amdahl articulated his arguments, both verbally and in three written pages, on the fundamental physical limitations that he theorized would govern the performance of any special feature or mode introduced to new machines. This set of arguments resulted in two, major and lesser, "laws" of computer performance regarding sequential versus parallel processing. These arguments continue to this day. 1979–2015: Entrepreneur Amdahl left his eponymous company in August 1979 to set up Trilogy Systems, together with his son Carl, and Clifford Madden. With over US$200 million in funds, Trilogy was aimed at designing an integrated chip for even cheaper mainframes, but the chip development failed within months of the company's $60 million public offering; thereafter, the company focused on developing its VLSI technology and, when that project failed, 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 builds 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