Pandora Toolbox

In the early 1990s I worked at SEMATECH, a semiconductor research consortium. A professor from UC Berkeley was asked to advise us on technology, and he recommended we implement something similar to the [UC Berkeley Software Warehouse[https://iris.eecs.berkeley.edu/services/software/]. Which we did. This pre-dated easy access to open-source software, and we built our own versino. I recall we supported HP-UX, AIX, Ultrix and Digital Unix. This was a time pre-Linux of course. I built a basic version of the Software Warehouse (SWW), and considered it a success.

Soon after that I joined AMD - literally across the street, as part of a small team tasked to support all of AMD design engineering. I was inspired to provide a similar toolbox for AMD internal use. For a funny reason the name Software Warehouse (SWW) was not accepted, and we settled on Pandora Toolbox (/tool/pandora).

We started with an open source package whose name is lost to me - it was something “package” and I recall it was created by someone at the University of Texas Austin. We extended it, starting in 1997, and as recently as 2022 I have heard this is still in use within AMD and Samsung.

We used /tool/pandora within AMD to support microprocessor, flash, chipset and other technology teams. We provided current access to perl and gcc and emacs and dozens of other tools, across HP-UX, Solaris, SunOS, and Linux. Of course.