Multiflow Computer, Inc., founded in April, 1984 near New Haven, Connecticut, USA, was a manufacturer and seller of minisupercomputer hardware and software embodying the VLIW design style. Multiflow, incorporated in Delaware, ended operations in March, 1990, after selling about 125 VLIW minisupercomputers in the United States, Europe, and Japan. While Multiflow's commercial success was small and short-lived, its technical success and the dissemination of its technology and people had a great effect on the future of computer science and the computer industry. Multiflow's computers were arguably the most novel ever to be broadly sold, programmed, and used like conventional computers. (Other novel computers either required novel programming, or represented more incremental steps beyond existing computers.) Along with Cydrome, an attached-VLIW minisupercomputer company that had less commercial success, Multiflow demonstrated that the VLIW design style was practical, a conclusion surprising to many. While still controversial, VLIW has since been a force in high-performance embedded systems, and has been finding slow acceptance in general-purpose computing. Early history Technology roots The VLIW (for Very Long Instruction Word) design style was first proposed by Joseph A. (Josh) Fisher, a Yale University computer science professor, during the period 1979-1981. VLIW was motivated by a compiler scheduling technique, called trace scheduling, that Fisher had developed as a graduate student at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University in 1978. Trace scheduling, unlike any prior compiler technique, exposed significant quantities of instruction-level parallelism (ILP) in ordinary computer programs, without laborious hand coding. This implied the practicality of processors for which the compiler could be relied upon to find and specify ILP. VLIW was put forward by Fisher as a way to build general-purpose instruction-level parallel processors exploiting ILP to a degree that would have been impractical using what would later be called superscalar control hardware. Instead, the compiler could, in advance, arrange the ILP to be carried out nearly in lock-step by the hardware, commanded by long instructions or a similar mechanism. While there had previously been processors that achieved significant amounts of ILP, they had all relied upon code laboriously hand-parallelized by the user, or upon library routines, and thus were not general-purpose computers and did not fit the VLIW paradigm. The practicality of trace scheduling was demonstrated by a compiler built at Yale by Fisher and three of his graduate students, John Ruttenberg, Alexandru Nicolau, and especially John Ellis, whose doctoral dissertation