Tadpole was later acquired by defense contractor
General Dynamics, in April 2005.[5]
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
reselling laptops from Tadpole Computer to
Asian governments. The reseller added secret software that allowed intelligence analysts to access the machines remotely.[6]
Products
Tadpole laptops used a variety of architectures, such as
SPARC,
Alpha,
PowerPC and
x86.[1] Although very expensive, these classic Tadpoles won favour as a method to show corporation's proprietary software (IBM/HP/DEC) on a self-contained portable device on a client site in the days before remote connectivity.[citation needed]
SPARC
The original SPARCbook 1[7] was introduced in 1992 with 8–32 MB RAM and a 25 MHz processor.[8][9] It was followed by several further SPARCbooks, UltraSPARCbooks (branded as Ultrabooks) - and the Voyager IIi.[10][11] These all ran the
SunOS or
Solaris operating systems.[12][13][14][15] In 2004, Tadpole released the Viper laptop.[16]
An
Alpha-based laptop, the ALPHAbook 1, was announced on 4 December 1995 and became available in 1996. The Alphabook 1 was manufactured in Cambridge, England. It used an
Alpha 21066A microprocessor specified for a maximum clock frequency of 233 MHz. The laptop used the
OpenVMS operating system.[18][19]
A
PowerPC-based laptop was also produced - the IBM RISC System/6000 N40 Notebook Workstation, powered by a 50 MHz
PowerPC 601 and with between 16 and 64MB RAM - and designed to run
IBM AIX.[20][21]
x86
Tadpole also produced a range of x86-based notebook computers, including the Tadpole P1000, and the TALIN laptops with
SUSE Linux, or optionally
Microsoft Windows.[22]
^Tadpole release Sparc notebooks, By Yvonne L. Lee, InfoWorld, 21 Feb 1994, Page 33, ...The $10,950 SparcBook 3....The $7,500 SparcBook 3LC...
^SPARC notebook manufacturer promises desktop performance, by Michael Fitzgerald, Computerworld, 28 Feb 1994, Page 41, ...Tadpole Technology Inc. in Austin, Texas, announced its third SPARC notebook....The $10,950 SPARCbook 3 uses Texas insstruments, Inc.'s 50-MHz MicroSPARC processor...
^Table 11-1: Identifying Different SPARC CPUs, Page 256, Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet, By Adrian Cockcroft, Richard Pettit, Sun Microsystems, ...System(Kernel Architecture): Tadpole SPARCbook 1 (sun4m) / CPU Mhz: 25 / CPU Type: Cypress 601...System(Kernel Architecture): Tadpole SPARCbook 2 (sun4m) / CPU Mhz: 40 / CPU Type: Fujitsu MB86903...System(Kernel Architecture): Tadpole SPARCbook 3 (sun4m) / CPU Mhz: 85-110 / CPU Type: microSPARC II...
^Tadpole boosts power in Pentium-, Sparc-based notebooks, By Yvonne L. Lee, InfoWorld, 24 Jul 1995, Page 45, ...The two new notebooks, shipping now, include the SparcBook 3GX...and the Tadpole P1300, the first 133-MHz Pentium-based notebook...A Pentium notebook with 8MB of RAM and a 340MB hard disk cost $6,995...