SUN workstation

The original Stanford University Network SUN workstation was designed to be a low cost ($10,000) personal workstation for computer aided logic design work. The design goal was to create a 3M computer: a 1 MIPS processor, 1 Megabyte of memory and a 1 Megapixel Raster scan Bit-map graphics display. (The $10,000 price point was the fourth "M" -- a "Megapenny"). Ethernet was included. The initial workstation was designed by Ralph Gorin and then given to Andy Bechtolsheim to create a finished design.

"The SUN workstation is a modular personal computer system designed for use in an Ethernet-type local network. A SUN workstation provides a single user with significant local computing power, a high resolution graphical display, graphical input, and network communication [Bechtolsheim] . The SUN station capabilities can be realized at a cost of approximately $10,000 per station, using commercially available VLSI components." [ A. Bechtolsheim and F. Baskett, “A Low-cost Raster-graphics Terminal” Proceedings SIGGRAPH 80, July, 1980.]

Eventually 10 SUN workstations were built in the 1981-1982 time frame. After the initial 10, Stanford declined to build any more. Andy Bechtolsheim then went out to shop the hardware design around. Many minicomputer vendors licensed the design. Many other products were based on Andy's CPU design including early Cisco routers and Imagen raster based print engines. Vinod Khosla, a fellow graduate of Stanford who was an early employee at Daisy Systems Corporation convinced Bechtolsheim along with Scott McNealy to found Sun Microsystems in order to build the Sun1/100 workstation.

The SUN workstation was made possible by the convergence of 3 technologies: VLSI, Multibus and ECAD.

VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) in semiconductor chips finally allowed for a high level of hardware functionality to be included in a single chip. The VLSI chips included the Motorola 68000 CPU, a parallel port controller and a serial port controller.

The Multibus computer interface allowed circuit boards made by different vendors to be integrated in to a single system. This allowed the Stanford 3M design to leverage off existing Multibus circuit boards such as the Chrislin CI-8086 128 and 512 KB memory expansion boards.

ECAD (Electronic Computer Assisted Design) was a critical development for the design of the SUN workstation. It allowed integration of the VLSI subsystems along with other sub systems into a single design in software with minimal hardware "bread boarding". This allowed larger systems of greater complexity to be designed by a small group of people. The ECAD software was an offshoot of a project to design processors tailored to specific computer languages, called the S-1 processor:

"The S-1 design system was constructed to support the development of the S-1 processor. The S-l design system consists of:

SCALD (Structured Computer Aided Logic Design) System - a hierarchically structured logic design system.

SUDS (Stanford University Drawing System) - a graphics system, used to edit, input, and output to/from SCALD.

A timing verifier - based on SCALD and designed to analyze and verify timing specifications and constraints in a digital system.

The physical design system - consists of both placement tools (chip placement) and wirewrap technology tools." [ [ftp://reports.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/csl/tr/81/201/CSL-TR-81-201.pdf Research in VLSI Systems Design and Architecture March 1981] ]

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