The company was founded by Brian A. Catalucci and Dave L. Kelley, the former a trained engineer who had previously worked as an airline pilot.

[2] These QDP computers were popular among the U.S. Navy for their reliability, and Quasar tapped into this military demand by making further entries in the series field-hardened.

Quasar Data Products was founded in North Olmsted, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, in 1979 by a group of Kent State University graduates.

[3] Prior to founding the company, Catalucci was a pilot for United Airlines and had graduated from KSU with a degree in aeronautical engineering.

It featured similar specifications to the QDP-100, including an equivalent clock speed, amount of RAM, and floppy drives, but came shipped with an intelligent terminal.

[8] In December 1982, Quasar began producing the QDP-300, an explicitly ruggedized machine that featured a built-in thermistor in the system unit which sounded an alarm if the temperature inside the main chassis was potentially overheating the computer.

[1] QDP was one of the few technology companies in northern Ohio—largely the domain of automotive manufacturing and steelmaking—to specialize in the field of computers.

According to Catalucci, this was due to local investors largely being reluctant to fund to high-tech companies out of ignorance and apathy for such products.

Each workstation terminal that interfaced with the QDP-400 was allocated a full 128 KB, and for a multi-user session this necessitated a card for each user.

The QDP-500, by contrast, was a much simpler machine, featuring only one Z80A processor clocked at 4 MHz, 128 KB of RAM stock, and one 5.25-inch disk drive.