Callan Data Systems

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Callan Data Systems Inc., was an innovative but short-lived computer manufacturer in the early 1980s named after its founder, Dave Callan, and located in Westlake Village, California, USA. After some success building a Unibus chassis with a self-contained CRT display to OEMs, the company designed and built desktop workstations named Unistar using the Stanford University SUN board, which was based on the Motorola 68000 CPU, and which ran UNIX licensed from AT&T. The manufacturing consisted of building the chassis, power supplies, motherboard, and few critical Unibus boards such as the CPU, memory, and floppy and hard drive controllers. Other peripheral boards such as an Ethernet controller were purchased from other OEMs. The software development consisted chiefly of writing device drivers for the integrated system, based on the UNIX kernel, and integrating third-party applications for resale to customers.

Other firms at time were competing to build the first commercial UNIX workstations based on inexpensive microprocessor-based single-board CPUs. Among these competitors were Sun Microsystems (which based their initial enormous success on their original similar SUN-based workstation), HP, Ithaca Intersystems and Wicat.

Callan sold about a thousand units in various models, including the Unistar 100, 200, and 300. The 100 and 200 models used the desktop chassis/CRT combination with Unibus backplane. The 300 model was a floor-standing chassis using dumb terminals.

Although aggressive sales won a modest number of industrial and government buyers, after several years Callan was not selling enough to be profitable, and the company was reorganized in bankruptcy under the control of numerous creditors. After a few futile months of attempting recovery, the committee of creditors voted to liquidate the company assets by public auction in bulk. The Dove family auctioneers won this auction, and began selling the parts inventory to owners of systems who wanted spares or upgrades. After several months of this retailing, the Doves held a public auction at the plant site, selling the entire remaining inventory to the highest bidders, and reaping many times their original investment. The Callan computers continued to be used during the 1980s, and at least one system was still running a critical database application for the US government into the 1990s.