Hailing from Sao Paolo, Brazil, Daniel Dallarossa and John Lima began Cyclades in the late 80s. The name originated from the early French computer network. However, they relocated to Fremont, California and developed their first product known as Cyclom-Y. This was a multiport serial card meant for computers with ISA or PCI busses. Their path in the business world would be changed though, as they were contacted by Phil Hughes of Linux Journal magazine. This resulted in Cyclades becoming the first vendor to support a Linux device driver. Their products, primarily terminal and console servers, would be open-source friendly from that point forward, and they enjoyed wide support among the open-source community.
Cyclades was acquired by Avocent in 2006.