SunRiver Data Systems was a division of SunRiver Corporation, a private company founded in 1986[1][2] in Jackson, Mississippi by four electrical engineers (Ronnie Hughes, Bill Long, Kester Rice, and Gerald Youngblood), all former employees of Diversified Technology, Inc.
Initially funded by a local businessman, the company moved to Austin, Texas in 1989 after acquiring venture capital financing from Sevin Rosen Funds and Austin Ventures.
[3][4] SunRiver developed the first Fiber Optic Station, a color graphics terminal which relied on a proprietary, patented, "bus extension" technology in which the parallel data bus of the multi-user computer is serialized and then reconstituted in the terminal device.
The Cygna 386 Fiber Optic Station was supported with native drivers by the early DR-DOS operating system produced by Digital Research, as well as SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) XENIX and AT&T UNIX.
The Cygna technology did not enjoy extensive commercial success, however, likely due to inherent speed limitations and the popularity of a competing approach offered by Citrix which was later adopted by Microsoft.