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 is provided by Flextronics. 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 (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.