Skip to content
◈ALB Atlas

SPARCstation 1 Dead

SPARCstation 1
KindMachine
Introduced1989
Discontinued1994
StatusDead
ManufacturerSun Microsystems
ClassWorkstation
PlatformSPARC RISC
Sourcebitsavers.org ↗

The pizza-box workstation — Sun's SPARC flagship that sold a hundred thousand units in months and made 'the network is the computer' a hardware fact.

Created by Sun Microsystems
Hosted SunOS Solaris

The SPARCstation 1 (April 1989) put Sun's SPARC RISC in the pizza-box form factor at $8,995 — the workstation that outsold everything in the market's best year, ~35,000 in three months.

SunOS 4 (BSD Unix + NFS + NIS) made it the canonical networked workstation of the early 90s — the machine the early web, the early net, and half the era's research ran on.

Sources

  1. bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation