Tadpole Computer was a manufacturer of rugged, military specification, UNIX workstations, thin client laptops and lightweight servers.

History

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 Carlsbad is a coastal city in the North County region of San Diego County, California, United States. The city is south of downtown Los Angeles and north of downtown San Diego. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 114,746. ...

, who produced the competing Britelite and Powerlite portable SPARC-based systems, for $6 million. Tadpole was later acquired by defense contractor

General Dynamics General Dynamics Corporation (GD) is an American publicly traded, aerospace and defense corporation headquartered in Reston, Virginia. As of 2020, it was the fifth-largest defense contractor in the world by arms sales, and 5th largest in the Uni ...

, in April 2005. Production continued until March 2013 but since then, they no longer sell any systems; and support for their products is provided by

Flextronics Flex Ltd. (previously known as Flextronics International Ltd. or Flextronics) is an American Singaporean-domiciled multinational diversified manufacturing company. It is the third largest global electronics manufacturing services (EMS), origi ...

. An anonymous

US intelligence The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

officer had stated to Reuters in 2013 that a decade earlier the US secretly created a company

reselling A reseller is a company or individual ( merchant) that purchases goods or services with the intention of selling them rather than consuming or using them. This is usually done for profit (but can be done at a loss). One example can be found in th ...

laptops from Tadpole Computer to Asian governments. The reseller added secret software that allowed intelligence analysts to access the machines remotely.

Products

Tadpole laptops used a variety of architectures, such as SPARC,

Alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whic ...

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

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 SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based on BSD, while versions 5.0 and l ...

Solaris Solaris may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Solaris'' (1972 film), directed by ...

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

-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 OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Ope ...

operating system.

IBM 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 Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

.Tadpole boosts power in Pentium-, Sparc-based notebooks
By Yvonne L. Lee, InfoWorld, 24 Jul 1995, Page 45, ''...The two new notebooks, shipping now, include the SparcBook 3GX...and the Tadpole P1300, the first 133-MHz Pentium-based notebook...A Pentium notebook with 8MB of RAM and a 340MB hard disk cost $6,995...''

External links

www.tadpolecomputer.com
on the Internet Archive
SPARCbook 3000ST - The coolest 90s laptop

References

{{Reflist, 30em 1994 establishments in California 2005 disestablishments in California American companies established in 1994 American companies disestablished in 2005 Computer companies established in 1994 Computer companies disestablished in 2005 Defunct computer companies of the United Kingdom Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies SPARC microprocessor products