Tandem Computers builds fault-tolerant systems (1974)
Tandem Computers was founded in 1974 and shipped the NonStop in 1976, the first commercially successful computer that kept running through hardware failure. Banks and telecom carriers adopted it because a single failed component never interrupted a transaction.
Tandem dominated the fault-tolerant server market for two decades.
Turned 'hardware will fail' into a design assumption for critical systems, a lesson mainstream computing absorbed gradually.
Clockwork applies the same assumption to AI training: hardware failures are inevitable, so the system should absorb them without losing work.
