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
Brooklyn Park,
Minnesota after delivering its 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 its 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. 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. In November 1993 NSC acquired the Boston-based Bytex Corp., a developer and manufacturer of WAN and LAN network switching system products including FDDI, Token Ring, and Ethernet adapters and switches. By 1995, NSC could not adapt to changing market conditions and merged with
StorageTek. ==Products==