History
The company was formed by former Control Data Corporation employees, James E. Thornton and Peter D. Jones in 1974. Initially based in Saint Paul, Minnesota the company moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota after delivering their first high-speed networking computers to the NSA. It merged with Storage Technology Corporation on September 20, 1995. Storage Technology Corporation was purchased by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 2005. Sun Microsystems was purchased by Oracle Corporation on April 20, 2009.
In the late 1980s, after enjoying great success in the mainframe computer market, NSC released its first product supporting the TCP/IP protocol, allowing customers to connect their mainframe computers to their emerging TCP/IP-based corporate and research networks. The market was shifting:
- Companies like Sun Microsystems and Apollo Computer had gained momentum showing the efficiency of distributed clusters of smaller workstations connected to a local area network.
- Internetworking companies, most notably Cisco Systems, entered the market with local and wide-area networking products using off-the-shelf components and custom software.
- Prices for workstations, networking infrastructure and routers plummeted.
NSC found itself in a strange position. Its HYPERchannel networking gear was being supplanted by cheaper and relatively plug-and-play LANs. In addition, the rapid evolution of routing protocols and software was not suited to their products which could neither be upgraded by the customer, nor booted from a server elsewhere on the network. In general, NSC products were maintained on-site by NSC technicians.
The company attempted to respond to market demands in 1991 by merging with Vitalink Communications Corporation, primarily a bridge manufacturer. Vitalink was well entrenched in the LAN/Network industry, however, bridges and issues with large Spanning-Tree domains were allowing the router manufacturers to gain position. Interestingly, Vitalink had a very good router running SPF, the predecessor to OSPF. Eventually, this nifty router proved to be too little too late. Vitalink was the "bridge company" while Cisco, Wellfleet, Proteon, and others were the router companies.
By 1995, NSC could not adapt to changing market conditions and merged with StorageTek.
Read more about this topic: Network Systems Corporation
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