Editing Kendall Square Research (section)

== History ==
As the company scaled up quickly to enter production, they moved in the late 1980s to 170 Tracer Lane, [[Waltham, Massachusetts]].

KSR refocused its efforts from the scientific to the commercial marketplace, with emphasis on parallel relational databases and OLTP operations. It then got out of the hardware business, but continued to market some of its data warehousing and analysis software products.

The first KSR1 system was installed in 1991. With new processor hardware, new memory hardware and a novel memory architecture, a new compiler port, a new  port of a relatively new operating system, and exposed memory hazards, early systems were noted for frequent system crashes.  KSR called their [[cache-only memory architecture]] (COMA) by the trade name ''Allcache''; reliability problems with early systems earned it the nickname ''Allcrash'', although memory was not necessarily the root cause of crashes.  A few KSR1 models were sold, and as the KSR2 was being rolled out, the company collapsed amid accounting irregularities involving the overstatement of revenue.

KSR used a proprietary processor because 64-bit processors were not commercially available.  However, this put the small company in the difficult position of doing both processor design and system design.  The KSR processors were introduced in 1991 at 20&nbsp;MHz and 40 MFlops.  At that time, the 32-bit [[Intel 80486]] ran at 50&nbsp;MHz and 50 MFlops.  When the 64-bit [[DEC Alpha]] was introduced in 1992, it ran at up to 192&nbsp;MHz and 192 MFlops, while the 1992 KSR2 ran at 40&nbsp;MHz and 80 MFlops.

One customer of the KSR2, the [[Pacific Northwest National Laboratory]], a [[United States Department of Energy]] facility, purchased an enormous number of spare parts, and kept their machines running for years after the demise of KSR.

KSR, along with many of its competitors (see below), went bankrupt during the collapse of the supercomputer market in the early 1990s. KSR went out of business in February 1994, when their stock was delisted from the stock exchange.

In April of 1996, the SEC filed a complaint against the company and several officers (Burkhardt III, the CEO and President; Peter Appleton Jones, the highest-ranked sales executive; and Karl G Wassman III, the CFO and CAO) for [[Accounting scandals#Fraudulent_financial_reporting|issuing materially false and misleading financial statements]] for six quarters in 1992 and 1993. These individuals and Thomas J MacCormack, director of contracts administration, were also accused of selling KSR stock while [[Insider trading|in possession of material nonpublic information]].<ref name="secdig1">{{cite news |author=<!--not stated--> |date=April 29, 1996 |title=COMPLAINT AGAINST KENDALL SQUARE RESEARCH CORP., HENRY BURKHARDT III, PETER JONES AND KARL WASSMANN III |url=https://www.sec.gov/news/digest/1996/dig042996.pdf |work=SEC News Digest | issue=96–79 |location= |access-date=August 1, 2024}}</ref> While no one admitted or denied wrongdoing, all individuals settled.<ref name="secdig1" /><ref name="secdig2">{{cite news |author=<!--not stated--> |date=November 12, 1996 |title=FINAL JUDGEMENTS ENTERED IN SEC v. KENDALL SQUARE, ET AL. |url=https://www.sec.gov/news/digest/1996/dig111296.pdf |work=SEC News Digest | issue=96–215 |location= |access-date=August 1, 2024}}</ref> All were ordered to pay disgorgements representing losses avoided as well as fines and interest accrued. Burkhardt paid some $1.1 million; MacCormack over $31,000.<ref name="secdig1" />  Though Wassman was ordered to pay in excess of $200,000, and Appleton Jones in excess of $300,000, they had spent their illicit gains in the meanwhile and all fines but $40,000 each were waived "on demonstrated inability to pay a greater amount."<ref name="secdig1" /><ref name="secdig2" />