| By June 1984, Trilogy was no longer working on a large-scale computer system that would be compatible with those made by IBM. It laid off about 120 people, or 20% of its workforce. The next month, Trilogy said that the new version of its superchip would roll out in the first quarter of 1985. Then it gave up on the superchip entirely because it "couldn't justify the expense." The company said it would pivot to developing the technology for packaging and interconnecting conventional superconductors. About half of its 460 workers were let go. Investors including Sperry and Digital Equipment wrote off huge chunks of their stakes in Trilogy. But Trilogy, even without putting out a product, still had cash to burn—about $100 million—and it owned facilities for building mainframes and semiconductors. In December 1984, Trilogy was in talks to acquire a small chip maker called California Devices, but those discussions soon fell apart. The following March, Trilogy found a new acquisition target: Elxsi, a maker of large computers. The $52.3 million deal closed in October 1985. Amdahl was named president and CEO of the combined company but relinquished those roles after less than a year; he remained chairman. Both Trilogy and Elxsi were operating at a loss at the time of the merger. Ultimately, Amdahl's biggest mistake might have been that he kept trying to beat IBM at its own game instead of working to build the next big thing, said Mike Miller, senior editor of Features and WSJ Weekend, who wrote about Trilogy as a reporter in the Journal's San Francisco bureau in the 1980s. "He fails because he spends too much money, and he fails because he isn't the hungry entrepreneur anymore," Miller said, reflecting on a 1987 article he wrote about why founders like Amdahl find it harder to achieve the same level of success the second time. "But he really failed because he was just trying to get a piece of the existing pie." "The really successful entrepreneurs leapfrog that market and destroy the incumbents by pioneering an entirely new market," he added. | 
