Tadpole Computer
Computer manufacturing company
Tadpole Computer was a manufacturer of rugged, military specification UNIX workstations, thin client laptops, and lightweight servers.
01History
Tadpole was founded in 1994 and originally based in Cambridge, England, then for a time in Cupertino, California.
In 1998, Tadpole acquired RDI Computer Corporation of Carlsbad, California, who produced the competing Britelite and Powerlite portable SPARC-based systems, for $6 million.
Tadpole was later acquired by defense contractor General Dynamics, in April 2005.
Production continued until March 2013 but since then, they no longer sell any systems; and support for their products was provided by Flextronics. Flextronics discontinued Tadpole support around 2019. Vector Data, a Tadpole OEM, still provides legacy Tadpole systems and support.
An anonymous US intelligence officer had stated to Reuters in 2013 that a decade earlier the US secretly created a company reselling laptops from Tadpole Computer to Asian governments. The reseller added secret software that allowed intelligence analysts to access the machines remotely.
02Products
Tadpole laptops used a variety of architectures, such as SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC and x86. Although very expensive, these classic Tadpoles won favour as a method to show corporation's proprietary software (IBM/HP/DEC) on a self-contained portable device on a client site in the days before remote connectivity.
SPARC
The original SPARCbook 1 was introduced in 1992 with 8-32 MB RAM and a 25 MHz processor. It was followed by several further SPARCbooks, UltraSPARCbooks (branded as Ultrabooks), and the Voyager IIi. These all ran the SunOS or Solaris operating systems. In 2004, Tadpole released the Viper laptop.
The SPARCLE was based on a 500-600 MHz UltraSPARC IIe or 1 GHz UltraSPARC IIIi.
DEC Alpha
An Alpha-based laptop, the ALPHAbook 1, was announced on 4 December 1995 and became available in 1996. The Alphabook 1 was manufactured in Cambridge, England. It used an Alpha 21066A microprocessor specified for a maximum clock frequency of 233 MHz. The laptop used the OpenVMS operating system.
IBM PowerPC
A PowerPC-based laptop was also produced, the IBM RISC System/6000 N40 Notebook Workstation, powered by a 50 MHz PowerPC 601 and with between 16 and 64MB RAM, and designed to run IBM AIX.
x86
Tadpole also produced a range of x86-based notebook computers, including the Tadpole P1000, and the TALIN laptops with SUSE Linux, or optionally Microsoft Windows.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Tadpole Computer”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Tadpole Computer logo.svg by Tadpole Computer, Public domain
- Tadpole SPARCBook (1).jpg by Steve Elliott, CC BY-SA 2.0
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