Callan Data Systems, Inc. was an American computer manufacturer founded by David Callan in Westlake Village, California on January 24, 1980. The company was best known for their Unistar range of Unix workstations, and shut down again in 1985.
Unistar
After initial success building a Multibus chassis with a self-contained VT100-compatible CRT display terminal to OEMs, the company designed and built desktop workstations named Unistar using the Sun-1 board, which was based on the Motorola 68000 CPU, and which ran UNIX licensed from AT&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 drive controllers. Other peripheral boards such as an Ethernet controller were purchased from other OEMs. The software development consisted chiefly of writing device drivers for the integrated system, based on the UNIX kernel, 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 inexpensive microprocessor-based Multibus-single-board CPUs.