the PERQ 2. The PERQ 3A had an all-new hardware architecture based around a 12.5 MHz Motorola 68020 microprocessor and 68881 floating-point unit, plus two AMD 29116A 32-bit bit slice processors which acted as graphics co-processors. It also had up to 2 MB of RAM, a SCSI hard disk and was housed in a desktop "mini-tower"-style enclosure. The operating system was a port of UNIX System V Release 2 called PNX 300. Prototype units were produced in 1985, but the project was cancelled before full production commenced (the project had run late and ICL decided it was a solution provider - it would sell Sun workstations as part of the solution). Another workstation design under development at the time of the company's demise, the PERQ 3B was a colour model (sometimes referred to as the PERQ 5) was taken over by Crosfield Electronics for its Crosfield Studio 9500 page layout workstation. The workstation was also known internally as Python, was developed in 1986 jointly by MegaScan and Conner Scelza Associates (both in Gibsonia, Pittsburgh) and the Crosfield team (in Hemel Hempstead, England). MegaScan, led by Brian Rosen, developed the workstation electronics and Conner Scelza Associates (led by Jerry Conner and Don Scelza) ported UNIX and wrote all the other supporting software. Crosfield (led by Andrew Chapman) were the overall project managers and had embedded engineers in MegaScan (Simon Butler and Mark Somervail) and Conner Scelza (Roger Willcocks). The Crosfield requirement was for a very high performance graphics system (known as Viper, developed by their subsidiary benchMark Technologies) and a large (at the time) amount of disk storage. The Crosfield team in Hemel Hempstead developed an early RAID solution that supported up to 8 SCSI controllers operating in parallel with data streaming from 5¼-inch full-height drives and a fast fibre-optic network known as GALAN. Prototypes were running in late 1986 in both the US and UK and volume production from Crosfield's Peterborough factory started early 1987. Peripherals Various optional OIO boards were produced for the PERQ 1 and 2: 3RCC OIO boards provided a 16-bit parallel PERQlink interface (intended for downloading microcode from another PERQ at boot time) plus Ethernet and/or a Canon CX laser printer controller. Thus, a PERQ 2 could be configured with two Ethernet ports (EIO plus OIO). A dot-matrix printer could also be connected to the RS-232 or IEEE-488 ports. Other third-party OIO boards were produced to