SPARCstation 1

The SPARCstation 1, or Sun 4/60, is the first of the SPARCstation series of SPARC-based computer workstations sold by Sun Microsystems. It had a distinctive slim enclosure (a square 3 inch high "pizza box") and was first sold in April 1989, with Sun's support for it ending in 1995.

Based around a LSI Logic RISC CPU running at 20 MHz, with a Weitek 3167 (or 3170) FPU coprocessor it was the fourth Sun computer (after the 4/260, 4/110 and 4/280) to use the SPARC architecture and the first of the sun4c architecture. The motherboard offered three SBus slots and had built-in AUI ethernet, 8 kHz audio, and a 5 MB/s SCSI-1 bus. The basic display ran at 1152×900 in 256 colours, and monitors shipped with the computer were 16 to 19 inch greyscale or colour.

Designed for ease of production to compete with high-end PCs or Macs, it sold for between about US$9,000 (with no hard disks), to US$20,000 — and in the first year around 35,000 units were sold.

Read more about SPARCstation 1:  Design, Memory, Disk Drives, NVRAM, Operating Systems, Related Computers