Tadpole was an unusual company. They would build Unix laptops, at first of their own designs, then adapting existing workstations to the laptop world, fitting them in laptop cases and adding power management code to the operating system.

They were so skilled that, at some point, they used the same case for their Alpha, PA-RISC and SPARC laptops, which were all based on modified designs: the AlphaBook 1 would be a modified DEC Multia, the PrecisionBook would be a modified HP 9000 C160L, and the SPARCbook 3 were modified SPARCstation 5.

Unlike their competitor RDI, which was making portable computers out of unmodified designs put in a ruggedized case and a plasma screen, still requiring them to be connected to a wall plug in order to work, Tadpole's machines were truly portable computers, with their own battery. And weighting quite a lot, but that was the case of all portable computers in the early '90s.

Here is the current Tadpole inventory.

• alpha
  • AlphaBook 1 (ander)
• sparc
  • SPARCbook 2 (barbita)
  • SPARCbook 3GX (biia)
  • SPARCbook 3XP