Cobalt Networks

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Cobalt Networks was a maker of low-cost servers based on Linux. Founded in 1996 in Mountain View, California under the name Cobalt Microserver, the company pioneered easy to use server appliances featuring secure web user interfaces for Internet service providers (ISPs) and small to medium sized businesses. Cobalt had an extremely successful IPO in December 1999 with the ticker symbol COBT when its stock price surged from an initial value of $22 to $128.13 at market close.^[1] Just a year later, Sun Microsystems acquired Cobalt for $2 billion in stock, in an attempt to compete with other Linux-based server vendors. Sun's Cobalt product line saw some initial success that slowly dwindled away. Now, Sun has retired its Cobalt products; however, they have opted to open source the software and firmware.^[2]

Cobalt Networks produced many different types of appliance servers. The two most popular were the Cobalt RaQ3 and RaQ4. The RaQ3 had a 300 MHz AMD K6 processor while the RaQ4 ran at 400 MHz. Cobalt also made a RaQ2 with a 200 MHz MIPS cpu along with a RaQ 550 with a 1 GHz processor and a server they called XTR. The dedicated server market was one of the largest customer markets for Cobalt servers. CobaltRacks was and is an independent dedicated server company that purchased hundreds of servers from Cobalt Networks. Many other hosting companies and ISPs purchased Cobalt Networks servers. The servers themselves were commonly referred to as blue pizza boxes by employees of these hosting companies. They were called this because of their size, shape and color.