SunRiver Data Systems was a division of SunRiver Corporation, a private company founded in 1986 in
Jackson, Mississippi
Jackson, officially the City of Jackson, is the Capital city, capital of and the List of municipalities in Mississippi, most populous city in the U.S. state of Mississippi. The city is also one of two county seats of Hinds County, Mississippi, ...
by four electrical engineers (Ronnie Hughes, Bill Long, Kester Rice, and Gerald Youngblood), all former employees of
Diversified Technology, Inc.
Diversified Technology, Inc. was a computer hardware manufacturing company. Based in Ridgeland, Mississippi, the company, which was a subsidiary of Ergon, Inc., was formed in 1971. In 1987, Diversified Technology released the first IBM-compatible ...
Initially funded by a local businessman, the company moved to
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the county seat, seat and largest city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and Williamson County, Texas, Williamson co ...
in 1989 after acquiring
venture capital financing
Venture capital financing is a type of funding by venture capital. It is private equity capital that can be provided at various stages or funding rounds. Common funding rounds include early-stage seed funding in high-potential, growth companies ...
from
Sevin Rosen Funds and
Austin Ventures
Austin Ventures (AV) is a private equity firm focused on venture capital and growth equity investments in business services and supply chain, financial services, new media, Internet, and information services companies nationally with a focus on ...
.
SunRiver developed the first Fiber Optic Station, a color graphics terminal which relied on a proprietary, patented, "bus extension" technology in which the parallel data bus of the multi-user computer is serialized and then reconstituted in the terminal device. Custom
LSI LSI may refer to:
Science and technology
* Large-scale integration, integrated circuits with tens of thousands of transistors
* Latent semantic indexing, a technique in natural language processing
* LSI-11, an early large-scale integration com ...
chips handled both ends of the connection, which later was converted from
fiber optic cable
A fiber-optic cable, also known as an optical-fiber cable, is an assembly similar to an electrical cable, but containing one or more optical fibers that are used to carry light. The optical fiber elements are typically individually coated with ...
using ST connectors, to
Category 5 cable
Category 5 cable (Cat 5) is a twisted pair cable for computer networks. Since 2001, the variant commonly in use is the Category 5e specification (Cat 5e). The cable standard provides performance of up to 100 MHz and i ...
. The Cygna 386 Fiber Optic Station was supported with native drivers by the early
DR-DOS
DR-DOS (written as DR DOS, without a hyphen, in versions up to and including 6.0) is a disk operating system for IBM PC compatibles. Upon its introduction in 1988, it was the first DOS attempting to be compatible with IBM PC DOS and MS-DO ...
operating system produced by
Digital Research
Digital Research, Inc. (DR or DRI) was a company created by Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit systems like MP/M, Concurrent DOS, FlexOS, Multiuser DOS, DOS Plus, DR DOS ...
, as well as SCO (
Santa Cruz Operation
The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (usually known as SCO, pronounced either as individual letters or as a word) was an American software company, based in Santa Cruz, California, that was best known for selling three Unix operating system variants ...
)
XENIX
Xenix is a discontinued version of the Unix operating system for various microcomputer platforms, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T Corporation in the late 1970s. The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) later acquired exclusive rights to the software, and ...
and AT&T
UNIX
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...
. The Cygna technology did not enjoy extensive commercial success, however, likely due to inherent speed limitations and the popularity of a competing approach offered by
Citrix
Citrix Systems, Inc. is an American multinational cloud computing and virtualization technology company that provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologies. C ...
which was later adopted by
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...
.
SunRiver Data Systems later became Boundless Technologies after simultaneously becoming a public corporation and acquiring the
Applied Digital Data Systems Applied Digital Data Systems (ADDS) was a supplier of video display computer terminals, founded in 1969 by Leeam Lowin and William J. Catacosinos. Lowin simultaneously founded Solid State Data Sciences (SSDS). SSDS was one of the first developers ...
division of
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...
in 1994.
[Press Release, March 27, 1995] By 1997, all of the original founders had left the company. Sometime after departing Boundless, Youngblood founded
FlexRadio, and Long founded
Viridian Gold; Rice and Hughes have continued to work in the semiconductor industry. In 2003, Boundless Corporation filed for
Chapter 11
Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code ( Title 11 of the United States Code) permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. Such reorganization, known as Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is available to every business, whet ...
bankruptcy protection, was acquired by the majority public stockholders and moved from
Hauppauge, NY to
Farmingdale, NY
Farmingdale is an incorporated village on Long Island within the Town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County, New York. The population was 8,189 as of the 2010 Census.
The Lenox Hills neighborhood is adjacent to Bethpage State Park and the rest of t ...
, where it produced
terminal emulation
A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote ter ...
software,
thin client
In computer networking, a thin client is a simple (low-performance) computer that has been optimized for establishing a remote connection with a server-based computing environment. They are sometimes known as ''network computers'', or in ...
terminals and replacements for old-style text
computer terminals. After a series of 2006 transactions the bankrupt but public Boundless Corporation was merged into the seeking-to-be public Haitian Consulting, a manufacturer of fine chemicals. Ironically, Boundless had become a public company by a similar transaction in 1994 when it used the public company, All Quotes Inc., as a merger vehicle to the public market.
References
{{Reflist
External links
History culled from newsgroups
Computer hardware companies