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Sun-1 workstation

Sun-1 workstation

Image creditcmnit (Flickr user), via Wikimedia Commons
CC BY-SA 2.0 ↗

Sun-1 workstation

Year
1982
Creator
Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy
Company
Sun Microsystems
Location
Stanford University, California

Description

The Sun-1 is the first workstation from Sun Microsystems, with a 10 MHz Motorola 68000 processor, high-resolution graphics, and Ethernet. It came from the SUN board that Andy Bechtolsheim designed as a Stanford graduate student.

Importance

Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, and Scott McNealy incorporated Sun in February 1982, and Bill Joy of Berkeley soon joined them. Sun workstations combined Unix, high-resolution graphics, and Ethernet, and they became the industry benchmark in the 1980s. Oracle bought Sun for approximately $7.4 billion in January 2010.

Interesting fact

Sun built fewer than 200 Sun-1 machines before it changed to the Motorola 68010, which supported virtual memory.

Acquisition

Oracle · 2010 · $7,400,000,000

Sources

  1. SUN Rises (CHM Revolution exhibition) ↗Computer History Museum
  2. 1982 | Timeline of Computer History ↗Computer History Museum
  3. Andreas Bechtolsheim, 2012 Stanford Engineering Hero ↗Stanford University School of Engineering
  4. Oracle Buys Sun (press release, Form 8-K exhibit) ↗U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission · 2009-04-20
  5. Sun Microsystems annual report on Form 10-K ↗U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission · 1994
  6. Oracle Corporation Form 8-K: completion of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems ↗U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission · 2010-01-28