Stardent Computers, Inc. was a manufacturer of graphics supercomputer workstations.
Stardent Inc. was formed from the merger of Ardent Computer Corporation and Stellar Computer Inc.. The merger was announced on August 30, 1989.[1] Ardent was based in Sunnyvale, California and Stellar was based in Newton, Massachusetts. In early July 1990, the west coast portion of Stardent joined the company headquarters on the east coast.[2] On July 24, 1990, Stardent fired co-chairmen Alan H. Michaels and Matthew Sanders III after they brought suit against Kubota Corporation, a major investor in Stardent.[3][4] The board of directors subsequently dismissed Michaels and Sanders from the board.[5]
In August 1991, Stardent spun off its popular Application Visualization System (AVS) software into a separate company.[6] In November of that same year, Stardent announced[7] that it would cease to operate under the name Stardent Computer Corp, 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 Computer Inc. 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.[8]
Stardent had decided to liquidate itself instead of pursuing new funding from Kubota Corporation. Its sales never were able to get above $50 million, which limited its ability to compete with other workstation manufacturers such as IBM, HP and Silicon Graphics.