Sun Ray - History

History

The concept began in Sun Microsystems Laboratories in 1997 as a project codenamed NeWT or NetWorkTerminal. The client was designed to be small, low cost, low power, and silent. It was based on the Sun Microelectronics MicroSparc IIep. Other processors initially considered for it included Intel's StrongARM, Philips Semiconductors TriMedia, National Semiconductors Geode. The MicroSparc IIep was selected because of its high level of integration, good performance, low cost, and general availability.

NeWT included 8 MB of EDO DRAM and 4 MB of NOR flash. The graphics controller used was the ATI Rage 128 because of its low power, 2D rendering performance, and low cost. It also included an ATI video encoder for TV-out (later removed in Sun Ray 1), a Philips Semiconductor SAA7114 video decoder/scaler, Crystal Semiconductor audio CODEC, Sun Microelectronics Ethernet controller, PCI USB host interface with 4 port hub, and I²C smart card interface. The motherboard and daughtercard were housed in an off-the-shelf commercial mini-ITX PC case with internal +12/+5VDC auto ranging power supply.

NeWT was designed to have as much feature parity with a modern business PC in every way possible. The client didn't use a commercial operating system. Instead it used a real-time exec which was originally developed in Sun Labs as part of an Ethernet-based security camera project codenamed NetCam. Less than 60 NeWT's were ever built and very few survive today. However one currently resides in the collection of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.