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When you're editing a directory like this one you come across a lot
of brands and jargon,
some of which stay in fashion for a while, but most of which get gradually
forgotten. So it was with great interest, and a sense of déja vu, that I
came across a press release from Tadpole recently about their new SPARCbook
5000.
It's been over 10 years since the original SPARCbook, a Sun
compatible notebook, made its original appearance in the pages of the SPARC
Product Directory, and for many years the word was synonymous with "SPARC
portable". But when Tadpole acquired competitor RDI Computer in October
1998 the flow of new portables came out with model names like VoyagerIIi and
UltraBookIIe and it seemed like we weren't going to see any more SPARCbooks
coming out from that stable.
Tadpole was brave in naming its portable
server VoyagerIIi, because the original "Voyager" SPARC portable was
an unlovely luggable from Sun Microsystems which didn't survive for long.
Instead Sun became a reseller for Tadpole's notebooks, and still is to this day.
However
our readers kept searching for SPARCbooks, despite tha name changes, and just
to be on the safe side, we made sure that Tadpole's company profile on this web
site included that term so that those readers went to the right place.
It's
very rare for a computer brand to last so long and still be a positive idea in
people's memory.
Clariion started out life as a RAID brand for Data
General, and is still used for low end storage systems by the company which
acquired it:- EMC. Similarly StorageWorks, which started out as the only good
product still made by DEC by the mid 1990's, was retained by Compaq when they
swallowed DEC. And StorageWorks still survives as a storage brand within the
newly enlarged HP. But it's hard to think of many others which have survived so
long.
Sun Microsystems stopped marketing new families of workstations
under the SPARCstation brand when they switched from 32 to 64 bit processor
chips in 1995. For a while their workstations were called "Ultra this",
or "Ultra that". Then Sun started fervently renaming products as "Sun
this" or "Sun that" to such an extent that I poked fun at this
process in an
article in which
I suggested that they should rename Solaris back to SunOS. They haven't taken
the hint yet.
The SPARCstation brand still has a good ring to it, and
it will be interesting to see if Sun take a lesson from Tadpole's relaunch, and
come up with a new range of modern SPARCstations.
On the other hand
some brands only have a short life. You wouldn't want to buy a PC powered by a
286 processor for instance, and even the Pentium, one of Intel's longest lived
processor brands looks like it will be phased out and replaced by Itanium.
Unfortunately Itanium sounds a bit radioactive to me, and as I live within
walking distance of a nuclear facility, it doesn't sound quite as positive as it
was surely intended to be.
Anyway, the SPARCbook is back, and I think
it may stay around for some time. |
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SPARCbook® 5000
from
Tadpole |
| . |
...Later,
...on October 7, 2002 it looked like the SPARCbook brand might get a
new owner when Tadpole Technology announced it wanted to sell off its hardware
division to a group including Mark Johnston, who founded Cycle Computer
(acquired by the Tadpole group 2 years earlier) and cofounder of the #2 SPARC
workstation manufacturer in the mid 1990's - Axil Computer. | |
