Stardent Inc.

Stardent Computer, Inc. was a manufacturer of graphics supercomputer workstations in the late 1990s. It was formed from two previous companies, Ardent Computer Corporation and Stellar Computer Inc. that were started in the late 1980s.

History

Stellar Computer

Stellar Computer was founded in 1985 in Newton, Massachusetts, US, and headed by William Poduska, who had founded Prime Computer and Apollo Computer. Their first product was demonstrated in March 1988. An investment from Japanese company Mitsui and others was announced in June 1988, bringing the total capital raised to $48 million.

Ardent Computer Corporation

At almost the same time, in November of 1985, Ardent Computer Corporation started out as Dana Computer, Inc. Founded by both Alan H. Michaels and Matthew Sanders III to develop similar products, Ardent Computer Corp. was based in Sunnyvale, California, US, part of Silicon Valley.

Gordon Bell who had been architect of the VAX computer, was an early member of Ardent. Michaels had considered working with Poduska, but founded Convergent Technologies instead, before Ardent. Japan-based Kubota Corporation became a major investor, owning up to 44% of Ardent. After some delay, a product was introduced in 1988.

The merger of the two rivals was announced on August 30, 1989, and completed in November 1989, with Poduska as chief executive. Bell served as chief scientist. Although the Stardent products were known for their high performance, they also demanded high prices. A 1990 model, was quoted at $123,400, for example, although much less than the Cray Y-MP.

In early July 1990, the California portion of Stardent was transferred to the company headquarters in Massachusetts. Co-chairmen Michaels and Sanders brought suit against Kubota on July 13 for $25 million in damages, contending that Kubota used its financial leverage over Ardent to force it to merge and then transfer people and technology into a Kubota unit. On July 24, 1990, Stardent fired co-chairmen Michaels and Sanders, after offering a settlement to avoid publicity. In August, the board of directors dismissed Michaels and Sanders from the board, and agreed to sell more equity in the company to Kubota for an additional $60 million.

In August 1991, Stardent spun off its popular Application Visualization System (AVS) software into a separate company. In November of that same year, Stardent announced that it would cease to operate under the name Stardent Computer, sell off its Titan workstation operations to Kubota Pacific Computers, find a buyer for its Vistra workstations and create a new company called GS Computer Services to provide maintenance and support for its discontinued GS series workstations it inherited from Stellar. Investors lost an estimated $200 million. The remainder of the company would focus on the AVS software system and the existing shareholders of Stardent would become shareholders of the software firm. By the end of the year, the company had given up on finding a buyer, believed to be Oki Electric, for the Vistra line of workstations but still hoped to sell the underlying graphics technology based on the Intel i860.

Stardent had decided to liquidate itself instead of pursuing new funding from Kubota Corporation. Its sales were estimated at only $40 million in 1990, which limited its ability to compete with other workstation manufacturers such as IBM, HP and Silicon Graphics. Kubota Graphics was dissolved in 1994.

Products

• Titan workstation
• Vistra workstation

Stellar Graphics Supercomputer

The Stellar line was called the graphics supercomputer (GS). It was considered an advanced design for the late 1980s.