reported that this included Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corporation, Fujitsu, Hughes, HAL Computer Systems, and Silicon Graphics. Other companies known to have licensed the technology include Equator Technologies, Hitachi and NEC. Compilers built starting from that code base were used for advanced development and benchmark reporting for the most important superscalar processors of the 1990s. Descendants of the compiler were still in wide use 20 years after it first started generating correct code (notably, Intel's icc "Proton" compiler and the NEC Earth Simulator compiler), and are often used as benchmark targets for new compiler development. MIT and the University of Washington are among the universities that received and used the compiler for advanced research purposes. The Multiflow compiler was written in C. It pre-dated the popular use of C++ (Multiflow was a beta-site for the language). The compiler designers were strong believers in the object-oriented paradigm, however, and the compiler had a rather idiosyncratic style that encapsulated the structures and operations in it. This caused a steep learning curve for the many developers who used it after Multiflow's demise, but one that was usually considered a good investment because of the unique combination of ambitious compiling and rock-solid engineering the compiler offered. Customers and business history Customers While a few of Multiflow's sales went to organizations wishing to learn more about the new VLIW design style, most systems were used for simulation in product development environments: mechanical, aerodynamic, defense, crash dynamics, chemical, and some electronic. Customers ranged from a major metropolitan air-quality board to a major consumer detergent, food and sundries company, along with the expected heavy industry companies, research laboratories and universities. In 1987, GEI Rechnersysteme GmbH, a division of Daimler-Benz, began distributing Traces in Germany with great success, despite fierce competition from other minisupercomputer companies. In the following three years, Multiflow opened offices or had distributors in most of Western Europe and Japan, and opened offices in many US metropolitan areas. Multiflow's end Multiflow ended operations on March 27, 1990, two days after a large deal contemplated with Digital Equipment Corporation came apart. At that point, the board determined that the prospects for successful additional financing, in the amounts necessary to bring Multiflow to maturity, were too unlikely to justify the company's continuation. Multiflow's failure is often blamed anecdotally on “good technology, but bad marketing,” on “good software, but slow, conservative hardware,” on some property of its innovative