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SUN Rises

Unleash the power of a Sun

Sun Microsystems became a powerful provider of graphics workstations in the 1980s and 90s.

SUN Rises

Three graduate students from Stanford and one from UC Berkeley founded SUN (Stanford University Network) Microsystems in 1982, producing graphical workstations that became the industry benchmark in the1980s.

As PCs equaled workstations in speed and power, SUN shifted from hardware to software. Its programming innovations included the Java platform, which lets a program run on any system.

Executives of Sun Microsystems

Bill Joy, Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla pose for a publicity photo with their sports cars and mobile phones.

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Sun-1 workstation

The Sun-1 featured a 16-bit 10 Mhz Motorola 68000 CPU, custom memory management, high-resolution graphics and Ethernet networking. Sun produced fewer than 200 Sun-1 workstations before switching to the 68010 processor, which supported virtual memory.

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Sun-3 advertisement

Workstations such as this handily out-performed PCs in the 1980s. But a decade later, PCs offered better performance…at lower cost.

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Sun-1 keyboard

The Sun-1 featured a 16-bit 10 Mhz Motorola 68000 CPU, custom memory management, high-resolution graphics and Ethernet networking. Sun produced fewer than 200 Sun-1 workstations before switching to the 68010 processor, which supported virtual memory.

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Sun-3 Running CircuitTool v. 3.04

Most graphical applications, like this circuit-design program, used their own specialized “graphical user interface.”

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