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| Industry | Computers |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1980; 46 years ago (1980) inWestlake Village, California |
| Founder | David Callan |
| Defunct | December 1985 (1985-12) |
| Fate | Bankruptcy liquidation |
Callan Data Systems, Inc. was an Americancomputer manufacturer founded by David Callan inWestlake Village, California on January 24, 1980. The company was best known for their Unistar range ofUnixworkstations, and shut down again in 1985.
After initial success building aMultibus chassis with a self-containedVT100-compatibleCRT display terminal toOEMs, the company designed and built desktop workstations named Unistar using theSun-1 board, which was based on theMotorola 68000CPU, and which ranUNIX licensed fromAT&T. The manufacturing consisted of building the chassis, power supplies,motherboard, and a few critical Multibus boards such as the CPU, memory, and floppy and hard drivecontrollers. Other peripheral boards such as anEthernet controller were purchased from other OEMs. The software development consisted chiefly of writingdevice drivers for the integrated system, based on the UNIXkernel, and integrating third-party applications for resale to customers. Investment totaled $10 million, raised from the founders and from venture capital. Employment peaked in 1984 at 80 persons.
Other firms at the time were competing to build the first commercial UNIX workstations based on inexpensivemicroprocessor-based Multibus-single-board CPUs. Among these competitors wereSun Microsystems (which based their initial enormous success on their original similarSUN-based workstation),HP,Apollo,Ithaca InterSystems andWicat.
Callan sold about a thousand units in various models, including the Unistar 100, 200, and 300. The 100 and 200 models, first delivered in 1982, used the desktop chassis/CRT combination with Multibusbackplane, with a list price of about $12,000.[1] The 300 model of 1985 was a floor-standing chassis usingdumb terminals, and sold for about $20,000. CPU speeds were typically 8 MHz, with 256KB to 2MB of main memory, and from 10MB to 43MB of hard disk storage. A 400 model using 360MBFujitsu hard drives was prototyped.UNIX V7 was originally ported to the Unistars, and laterUNIX System V; all the Uniplus ports were provided byUniSoft.[2]
Although aggressive sales of the Unistar computers won a modest number of industrial and government buyers, with sales peaking at $7 million in 1984, Callan was not selling enough to be profitable. Competitive workstations from Sun and HP runningBSD UNIX were gaining market share, and the UNIX System V incompatibilities, though slight, made it even more difficult for Callan to compete. Sales in 1985 shrank to less than half the previous year, and Callan was reorganized in bankruptcy under the control of numerous creditors. After a few futile months of attempting recovery, the committee of creditors voted toliquidate the company assets valued at $1.6 million bypublic auction in bulk. The Dove family auctioneers, who had famously handled the recent liquidation of theOsborne Computer Corporation, won the company assets for $201 thousand (13 cents per dollar of valuation) in December 1985, and began selling inventory to owners of systems who wanted spare parts or upgrades at full price. After several weeks of this retailing, the Doves held apublic auction at the plant site in February 1986, selling the entire remaining inventory to the highest bidders, and reaping many times their original investment. The bankruptcy proceeding eventually paidsecured creditors in full. Unsecured creditors were left holding $1.9 million in debt, and in 1988 were paid 1.3 cents for each dollar to finally close the case.
Callan Unistar computers continued to be used during the 1980s. At least one Unistar 300 was still running acritical database application for theU.S. Government into the 1990s.[citation needed]