CADO was based in Torrance, California and had a manufacturing plant and systems software engineering team in Cork, Ireland.

These multitasked by using a hardware tick to XOR the base address of where the native ("CADOL" a BASIC-like interpreter) took instructions from.

The primary user sat at the CAT III system console, which contained the CPU, floppy drive, and hard disk.

The language was extended by Richard Sexton, who added Pascal-/C-like syntax and 65 KB instead of 256 byte program overlay sizes.

At some point when a fair number[clarification needed] of applications had been written, the loading of overlays was made transparent by Sexton's modifications to the interpreter up to an apparent program of 65 KB.

After the /8, the technical staff wanted to gang more of these machines together, but the marketing department demanded 16-bit systems.

The Motorola 68000 was the preferred choice of software people, but Bob Thorne, VP of hardware, delivered the news: Motorola only had a great CPU while Intel had a CPU and chipset family of CTCs, interrupt controllers, serial ports, DMA controllers and x86 became the industry standard, much to the disappointment of the software staff, who thought Thorne should just build all those bits he didn't have.

All previous CADO computers had been single-board systems that would probably be familiar to anybody who has ever seen a modern motherboard; the parts were just bigger, and there were fewer of them.

With the 8086 came the net and around 1984 or 1986 CADO connected to the UUCP-based Usenet news and mail networks and finally had a UNIX system, requisitioned to run mail and news which engineering considered vital while the rest of the company had no idea what it was.

Before the first Tiger was sold though, George Ryan, the founder of the company, left and the IBM PC came out.

Instead of a completely proprietary hardware solution and operating systems, these were based on commodity components.

At that point, almost all proprietary hardware requirements were dropped except the terminal firmware.