Talk:Ardent Computer

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)