There were several companies competing in this space. The main three were CSPI, Mercury Computing (now Mercury Systems), and SKY Computing. Matrox briefly tried

There were several companies competing in this space. The main three were CSPI, Mercury Computing (now Mercury Systems), and SKY Computing. Matrox briefly tried to join the party. Even back then, FPGAs and custom ASICs would be part of the compute fabric. I left that out. For example, there was an FFT accelerator chip. These days the companies add in a mix of FPGAs and GPUs, but the CPUs are still there. It's all the same stuff today, but faster. To the end user, it was never a computer. It was a radar, a video processor, an MRI scanner, a sonar, an ultrasound, a chip wafer inspection device, a laser with real-time mirror warping, or some other tool.