Nestar Systems, Inc., was an early independent manufacturer of pre-internet local area networks for personal computers from 1978 to 1986 and was considered "a pioneer in the industry". It produced three major generations of products:
Cluster/One (September 1979) provided program file sharing for up to 30 Commodore PET, Apple ][, and Radio Shack TRS-80 personal computers. A PET with two 8" floppy disks was the program server that polled for client requests using a daisy-chained flat ribbon cable up to 250 feet long. Cluster/One Model A (March 1980) provided general communication among Apple ][ and Apple /// personal computers using a parallel flat ribbon cable with arbitrary branching topology up to 1000 feet long. Apple ][ computers served as fileservers (with floppy disks, hard disks, and cartridge tape backup), print servers, and communications servers linking multiple networks over modems. Applications included filesharing, electronic mail, database management, and financial management. PLAN Series (December 1982) provided general communication among Apple ][ and IBM PC personal computers using Datapoint's ARCNET network and Xerox's XNS networking protocols. Proprietary small, medium, and large servers, using Motorola 68000 microprocessors, served as file servers (including tape backup and shadow servers), spooled print servers, and communications servers. Applications included filesharing, electronic mail, database management, financial management, IBM 3270 terminal emulation to link to mainframes, Telex simulation, and interactive chat.
In 1986 Nestar was sold to Digital Switch Corporation (now DSC Communications) of Plano, Texas, which continued to develop some of the product line for about two years.
Corporate history
Nestar was founded in Palo Alto, California on October 13, 1978. by Harry Saal, Len Shustek, Jim Hinds, and Nick Fortis, to make networks that allowed sharing of centralized services like disks and printers for the then-new personal computers: Commodore PET, Apple ][, and Radio Shack TRS-80. Initial funding was provided by the founders, primarily Saal. By July 1980 the company had 11 employees.
In July 1980, the Rank Organization in the UK purchased a 40% stake in Nestar Systems, and created a wholly Rank-owned subsidiary, Zynar Ltd in Uxbridge, England, to cooperate in the development of future systems. In March 1982 there was a $2.5M second round of financing, and there were over 50 employees. By 1983 Rank had made additional investments which increased their ownership in Nestar to 59%. By October 1984 they owned 85%. Annual revenue had grown from $318.000 in 1979 to $10,032,000 in 1984, but profitability had still not been achieved even though they were one of the top 10 PC local area network vendors
In August 1985 it was announced that Nestar was to be bought by Net America, a Dallas-based startup common carrier founded by Sam Wyly, who also founded University Computing Company and was chairman of Sterling Software, Inc. The acquisition was even announced, but it never happened. Nestar was instead acquired a year later, in October 1986, by Digital Switch Corporation (soon to become DSC Communications) of Plano Texas. They operated the company as a subsidiary called "DSC Nestar Systems".
At the time of the acquisition by DSC, Nestar founders Saal and Shustek left the company and received the rights to a Nestar internal local area network test tool that they developed into Network General's Sniffer protocol analyzer.
In August 1979 Nestar had created a wholly-owned subsidiary called "Palo Alto ICs'". Its only product was an add-on to the Commodore PET computer called the "BASIC Programmer's Toolkit" a collection of programming aids for the Commodore PET computer distributed as a hardware read-only-memory (ROM). It was sold both by Nestar and the Zynar subsidiary of Rank.
Nestar only filed two trademark registrations: one for "Toolkit" (first used 8/27/79, filed 10/13/81, registered 12/13/82, cancelled 4/17/90), and one for "Cluster/One" (first used 12/1/78, filed 5/29/79, registered 4/6/82, cancelled 11/18/88). They received one patent for the addressing scheme used in the first Cluster/One system.
LAN systems
Cluster/One (Model One) The Cluster/One system released in September 1979 allowed Commodore PET, Apple ][, or TRS-80 user stations called "Drones" to save and load programs from a PET central file server called the "Queen". The price for the Queen started at $4995, and Drone interfaces ranged from $25 to $150.