PERQ

The PERQ, also referred to as the Three Rivers PERQ or ICL PERQ, was a pioneering workstation computer produced in the early 1980s.

The workstation was conceived by six former Carnegie Mellon University alumni and employees, Brian S. Rosen, James R. Teter, William H. Broadley, J. Stanley Kriz, D. Raj Reddy and Paul G. Newbury, who formed the startup Three Rivers Computer Corporation (3RCC) in 1974. Brian Rosen also worked at Xerox PARC on the Dolphin workstation. The PERQ design was influenced by the original workstation computer, the Xerox Alto. It was the first commercially produced personal workstation, a prototype PERQ being shown at the 1979 SIGGRAPH conference. The origin of the name "PERQ" was chosen both as an acronym of "Pascal Engine that Runs Quicker," and to evoke the word perquisite.