SUN workstation

[2] Professor Forest Baskett suggested the best-known configuration: a relatively low-cost personal workstation for computer-aided logic design work.

The design created a 3M computer: a 1 million instructions per second (MIPS) processor, 1 Megabyte of memory and a 1 Megapixel raster scan bit-map graphics display.

The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) had pioneered personal display terminals, but the 1971 system was showing its age.

Les Earnest licensed the CPU board for one of the first commercial low-cost laser printer controllers at a company called Imagen.

[1]: 20 Vinod Khosla, also from Stanford, convinced Bechtolsheim along with Scott McNealy to found Sun Microsystems in order to build the Sun-1 workstation, which included some improvements to the earlier design.

[6] Other faculty members who did research using SUN workstations included David Cheriton, Brian Reid, and John Hennessy.

The three boards (plus memory extension) as later marketed by Sun Microsystems circa 1983