Tadpole Computer
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, 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.
Products
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 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 – 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.