Nibble:- Return of the SPARCbook

When you've been editing a directory like this one for more than ten years, 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.