Research

A Docking station or port replicator or dock provides a simplified way of “plugging-in” an electronic device such as a laptop computer to common peripherals. Because a wide range of dockable devices--from mobile telephones to wireless mice--have different connectors, power signaling, and uses, docks are not standardized and are therefore often designed with a specific make and model of a device in mind.

Callan Data Systems Inc., from 1980 to 1985 was an innovative but short-lived computer manufacturer, named after its founder, David Callan, and located in Westlake Village, California, USA. After initial success building a Multibus chassis with a self-contained VT-100-compatible CRT display terminal to OEMs, the company designed and built desktop workstations named Unistar using the Sun-1 board, which was based on the Motorola 68000 CPU, and which ran UNIX licensed from AT&T. The manufacturing consisted of building the chassis, power supplies, motherboard, and a few critical Multibus boards such as the CPU, memory, and floppy and hard drive controllers. Other peripheral boards such as an Ethernet controller were purchased from other OEMs. The software development consisted chiefly of writing device drivers for the integrated system, based on the UNIX kernel, and integrating third-party applications for resale to customers. Investment totaled $10 million, raised from the founders and from venture capital. Employment peaked in 1984 at 80 persons.

Torch Computers Ltd was a computer hardware company formed in 1982 in Great Shelford, near Cambridge, UK and became well known for its computer peripherals for the BBC Micro. Torch produced several second processor units for the BBC Micro with integrated floppy disk or hard disk drives, including the Z80 Disc Pack (ZDP), Graduate and Unicorn, with Z80, 8088 and 68000 processors respectively. The ZDP ran the CPN operating system, a clone of CP/M, the Graduate, MS-DOS 2.11 and the Unicorn UNIX.

The Three Rivers Computer Corporation (3RCC) was a spinoff of the Computer Science department at Carnegie-Mellon University, and was founded in 1974 by Brian Rosen, Jim Tetar, Bill Broadley, Stan Kriz, and Paul Newbury. The company was located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. The company's principal products were a line of workstation computers called PERQ, launched in 1979. 3RCC changed its name to PERQ Systems Corporation in 1984, but became insolvent in 1985.

Stardent Inc. was formed from the merger of Ardent Computer Corporation and Stellar Computer Inc.. The merger was announced on August 30, 1989. Ardent was based in Sunnyvale, California and Stellar was based in Newton, Massachusetts. In early July 1990, the west coast portion of Stardent joined the company headquarters on the east coast. On July 24, 1990, Stardent fired co-chairmen Alan H. Michaels and Matthew Sanders III after they brought suit against Kubota Corporation, a major investor in Stardent. The board of directors subsequently dismissed Michaels and Sanders from the board.

Next, Inc. (later Next Computer, Inc. and Next Software, Inc. and stylized as NeXT) was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets. NeXT was founded in 1985 by Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs after he resigned from Apple. NeXT introduced the first NeXT Computer in 1988, and the smaller NeXTstation in 1990. Sales of the NeXT computers were relatively limited, with estimates of about 50,000 units shipped in total. Nevertheless, its innovative object-oriented Nextstep operating system and development environment were highly influential.

MIPS Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: MIPS), formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc., is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of pioneering RISC chips. MIPS provides processor architectures and cores for digital home, networking and mobile applications.

Evans & Sutherland (NASDAQ: ESCC) is a computer firm involved in the computer graphics field. Their products are used primarily by the military and large industrial firms for training and simulation, and in digital projection environments like planetariums.

Computervision, Inc. (CV) was an early pioneer in turnkey Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAM). Computervision was founded in 1969 by Marty Allen and Philippe Villers, and headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts, USA. Its early products were built on a Data General Nova platform. Starting around 1975, Computervision built its own "CGP" (Computervision Graphics Processor) Nova-compatible 16-bit computers with added instructions optimized for graphics applications and using its own operating system known as Computervision Graphic Operating System (CGOS). In the 1980s, Computervision transitioned to Unix.

The Ardent Computer Corporation was a graphics minicomputer manufacturing company. The systems also used the Intel i860 as graphics co-processors. The company went through a series of mergers and re-organizations and changed names several times as their venture capital funders attempted to find a market niche for their "graphics supercomputers". After a series of machines that were not particularly successful in the marketplace, they used parts of their design to create graphics subsystems for other workstations, notably DEC machines, but eventually shut down completely in February 1995.