Tadpole SPARCle
   HOME





Tadpole SPARCle
Tadpole Computer was a manufacturer of rugged, military specification, Unix, 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 RDI PowerLite, 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 Reseller, reselling laptops from Tadpole Computer to Asian governments. The reseller added secret software that allowed intelligence analysts to access the machines remotely. Products Tadp ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

General Dynamics
General Dynamics Corporation (GD) is an American publicly traded aerospace and defense corporation headquartered in Reston, Virginia. As of 2020, it was the fifth largest defense contractor in the world by arms sales and fifth largest in the United States by total sales. The company is a ''Fortune'' 100 company and was ranked in 2022. Formed in 1952 with the merger of submarine manufacturer Electric Boat and aircraft manufacturer Canadair, the corporation today consists of ten subsidiary companies with operations in 45 countries. The company's products include Gulfstream business jets, and nuclear-powered submarines, guided-missile destroyers, M1 Abrams tanks, and Stryker armored fighting vehicles. In 2024, General Dynamics had worldwide sales of $47.7 billion and a workforce of approximately 117,000 full-time employees. The current chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) is Phebe Novakovic. History Electric Boat General Dynamics traces its ancestry to John Philip ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

PowerPC
PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM alliance, AIM. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has been named Power ISA since 2006, while the old name lives on as a trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture–based processors. Originally intended for personal computers, the architecture is well known for being used by Apple's desktop and laptop lines from 1994 until 2006, and in several videogame consoles including Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3, and Nintendo's GameCube, Wii, and Wii U. PowerPC was also used for the Curiosity (rover), Curiosity and Perseverance (rover), Perseverance rovers on Mars and a variety of satellites. It has since become a niche architecture for personal computers, particularly with A ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Military Computers
This article specifically addresses U.S. armed forces military computers and their use. History Some of the earliest computers were military computers. Military requirements for portability and ruggedness led to some of the earliest transistorized computers, such as the 1958 AN/USQ-17, the 1959 AN/MYK-1 (MOBIDIC), the 1960 M18 FADAC, and the 1962 D-17B; the earliest integrated-circuit based computer, the 1964 D-37C; as well as one of the earliest laptop computers, the 1982 Grid Compass. Military requirements for a computer small enough to fit through a submarine's hatch led to the AN/UYK-1. Construction Typically a military computer is much more robust than an industrial computer enclosure. Most electronics will be protected with a layer of conformal coating. There will be more structure inside to support the components, the plug-in cards will be individually supported and secured to assure they do not pop out of their sockets, the processor and heat sink will be secured, mem ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sectors of the computing industry – Windows (unqualified) for a consumer or corporate workstation, Windows Server for a Server (computing), server and Windows IoT for an embedded system. Windows is sold as either a consumer retail product or licensed to Original equipment manufacturer, third-party hardware manufacturers who sell products Software bundles, bundled with Windows. The first version of Windows, Windows 1.0, was released on November 20, 1985, as a graphical operating system shell for MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The name "Windows" is a reference to the windowing system in GUIs. The 1990 release of Windows 3.0 catapulted its market success and led to various other product families ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

SUSE Linux
openSUSE () is a free and open-source Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. It is offered in two main variations: ''Tumbleweed'', an upstream rolling release distribution, and ''Leap'', a stable release distribution which is sourced from SUSE Linux Enterprise. The openSUSE project is sponsored by SUSE of Germany; the company released the first version as SUSE Linux in 1994. Its development was opened up to the community in 2005, which marked the creation of openSUSE. The focus of the developers is on creating a stable and user-friendly RPM-based operating system with a large target group for workstations and servers. Additionally, the project creates a variety of related tools, such as YaST, Open Build Service, openQA, Snapper, Portus, KIWI, and OSEM. Product history SUSE Linux In the past, the SUSE Linux company has focused on releasing the SUSE Linux Personal and SUSE Linux Professional box sets which included extensive printed documentation that w ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

IBM AIX
AIX (pronounced ) is a series of Proprietary software, proprietary Unix operating systems developed and sold by IBM since 1986. The name stands for "Advanced Interactive eXecutive". Current versions are designed to work with Power ISA based Server (computing), server and workstation computers such as IBM's IBM Power Systems, Power line. Background Originally released for the IBM RT PC Reduced instruction set computer, RISC workstation in 1986, AIX has supported a wide range of hardware platforms, including the IBM IBM RS/6000, RS/6000 series and later IBM Power microprocessors, Power and PowerPC-based systems, IBM System i, System/370 mainframes, IBM PS/2, PS/2 personal computers, and the Apple Network Server. Currently, it is supported on IBM Power Systems alongside IBM i and Linux. AIX is based on UNIX System V with 4.3BSD-compatible extensions. It is certified to the UNIX 03 and UNIX V7 specifications of the Single UNIX Specification, beginning with AIX versions 5.3 an ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

PowerPC 600
The PowerPC 600 family was the first family of PowerPC processors built. They were designed at the Somerset facility in Austin, Texas, jointly funded and staffed by engineers from IBM and Motorola as a part of the AIM alliance. Somerset was opened in 1992 and its goal was to make the first PowerPC processor and then keep designing general purpose PowerPC processors for personal computers. The first incarnation became the PowerPC 601 in 1993, and the second generation soon followed with the PowerPC 603, PowerPC 604 and the 64-bit PowerPC 620. Nuclear family PowerPC 601 The PowerPC 601 was the first generation of microprocessors to support the basic 32-bit PowerPC instruction set. The design effort started in earnest in mid-1991 and the first prototype chips were available in October 1992. The first 601 processors were introduced in an IBM RS/6000 workstation in October 1993 (alongside its more powerful multichip cousin IBM POWER2 line of processors) and the first Apple Power ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

OpenVMS
OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using OpenVMS include banks and financial services, hospitals and healthcare, telecommunications operators, network information services, and industrial manufacturers. During the 1990s and 2000s, there were approximately half a million VMS systems in operation worldwide. It was first announced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) as VAX/VMS (''Virtual Address eXtension/Virtual Memory System'') alongside the VAX-11/780 minicomputer in 1977. OpenVMS has subsequently been ported to run on DEC Alpha systems, the Itanium-based HPE Integrity Servers, and select x86-64 hardware and hypervisors. Since 2014, OpenVMS is developed and supported by VMS Software Inc. (VSI). OpenVMS offers high availability through computer cluster, clustering—the ability t ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Alpha 21064
The Alpha 21064 is a microprocessor developed and fabricated by Digital Equipment Corporation that implemented the Alpha (introduced as the Alpha AXP) instruction set architecture (ISA). It was introduced as the DECchip 21064 before it was renamed in 1994. The 21064 is also known by its code name, EV4. It was announced in February 1992 with volume availability in September 1992. The 21064 was the first commercial implementation of the Alpha ISA, and the first microprocessor from Digital to be available commercially. It was succeeded by a derivative, the Alpha 21064A in October 1993. This last version was replaced by the Alpha 21164 in 1995. History The first Alpha processor was a test chip codenamed EV3. This test chip was fabricated using Digital's 1.0-micrometre (μm) CMOS-3 process. The test chip lacked a floating point unit and only had 1  KB caches. The test chip was used to confirm the operation of the aggressive circuit design techniques. The test chip, along with ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Tadpole ALPHAbook 1
A tadpole or polliwog (also spelled pollywog) is the larval stage in the biological life cycle of an amphibian. Most tadpoles are fully aquatic, though some species of amphibians have tadpoles that are terrestrial. Tadpoles have some fish-like features that may not be found in adult amphibians, such as a lateral line, gills and swimming tails. As they undergo metamorphosis, they start to develop functional lungs for breathing air, and the diet of tadpoles changes drastically. A few amphibians, such as some members of the frog family Brevicipitidae, undergo direct development i.e., they do not undergo a free-living larval stage as tadpoles instead emerging from eggs as fully formed "froglet" miniatures of the adult morphology. Some other species hatch into tadpoles underneath the skin of the female adult or are kept in a pouch until after metamorphosis. Having no hard skeletons, it might be expected that tadpole fossils would not exist. However, traces of biofilms have been pres ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


UltraSPARC III
The UltraSPARC III, code-named "Cheetah", is a microprocessor that implements the SPARC V9 instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Sun Microsystems and fabricated by Texas Instruments. It was introduced in 2001 and operates at 600 to 900 MHz. It was succeeded by the UltraSPARC IV in 2004. Gary Lauterbach was the chief architect. History When presented at the '97 Microprocessor Forum, the probable introduction date for the UltraSPARC III was 1999, and it would have competed with Digital Equipment Corporation's Alpha 21264 and Intel's Itanium (Merced). This was not to be the case as it was delayed until 2001. Despite being late, it was awarded the Analysts' Choice Award for Best Server/Workstation Processor of 2001 by ''Microprocessor Report'' for its multiprocessing features. Description The UltraSPARC III is an in-order superscalar microprocessor. The UltraSPARC III was designed for shared memory multiprocessing performance, and it has several features that ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




UltraSPARC IIe
The UltraSPARC is a microprocessor developed by Sun Microsystems and fabricated by Texas Instruments, introduced in mid-1995. It is the first microprocessor from Sun to implement the 64-bit SPARC V9 instruction set architecture (ISA). Marc Tremblay was a co-microarchitect. Microarchitecture The UltraSPARC is a four-issue superscalar microprocessor that executes instructions in in-order. It includes a nine-stage integer pipeline. Functional units The execution units were simplified relative to the SuperSPARC to achieve higher clock frequencies - an example of a simplification is that the ALUs were not cascaded, unlike the SuperSPARC, to avoid restricting clock frequency. The integer register file has 32 64-bit entries. As the SPARC ISA uses register windows, of which the UltraSPARC has eight, the actual number of registers is 144. The register file has seven read and three write ports. The integer register file provides registers to two arithmetic logic units and the load ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]