Talk:Ardent Computer

This redirect does not require a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Companies

This redirect is within the scope of WikiProject Companies, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of companies on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.CompaniesWikipedia:WikiProject CompaniesTemplate:WikiProject Companiescompany articles

WikiProject Companies To-do:

Here are some tasks awaiting attention:

Article requests : Wikipedia:Requested articles/Business and economics/Companies
Assess : Category:Unassessed company articles
Copyedit : Category:Company articles needing attention
Infobox : Category:Company articles needing infoboxes
Maintain : Portal:Companies
Stubs : Help expand stub articles located at Category:Company stubs
Other :
- Tag company articles with the {{portal|Companies}} template
- Tag company talk pages with the {{WikiProject Companies}} project banner
- Answer requests for comments

Computing

	This redirect is within the scope of WikiProject Computing, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of computers, computing, and information technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ComputingWikipedia:WikiProject ComputingTemplate:WikiProject ComputingComputing articles
	This redirect is supported by Computer hardware task force.

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Your stated timeline is a bit off. I worked at Stellar from 1988-1990. Ardent and Stellar Computer merged around 1990. Bill Poduska Jr (the CEO and founder of Stellar) and the CEO of Ardent were old rivals. Bill wrested control of the company and moved HQ to West Newton, MA. The former Ardent CEO quit in disgust.

Stardent then sold a controlling interest to Kubota because it was bleeding money badly. Stardent sold its current technology (based on a proprietary ASICS design) outright to Kubota. At a company picnic at Bill Poduska Jr's house in MA, he unveiled the new generation of graphics workstation, the Stiletto. It would retail for around $30K, while the older generation sold for around $80K and had less horsepower. The new box had a 1U footprint and was intended to be a desktop workstation. The old box was the size of an apartment refrigerator!

Stardent went belly up in 1991, about six months after I left it in Oct 1990. The only viable product left was AVS, the scientific visualization software running on Stellar hardware. AVS lived on for a few more years.

- Dan Clamage

From the Kubota Graphics section:

"SGI, originally an add-in board manufacturer for Sun Microsystems workstations"

Being the SGI nut that I am I think I can vouch that SGI never produced anything for SUN. The SUN-1 and IRIS 1000 series shared the same Motherboard, a PM1 (Processor Module 1) designed by Andy Bechtolstein from SUN, but that changed with the IRIS 2000 to IP (Inhouse Processor). A USENET quote from Jim Clark himself in 1999:

"SUN had alway's meant Stanford University Network, and "SUN Terminal" was sprinkled throughout my paper. I said I'd be damned if I was going to give the impression that the Geometry Engine was part of SUN Microsystems".

I'll do some more looking around, but I think this may need to altered to something more accurate.

-mil —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 01:28, 19 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]