[TUHS] SUN (Stanford University Network) was PC Unix

Jim Geist velocityboy at gmail.com
Sat Apr 10 00:23:49 AEST 2021


Fun trivia fact, at least until the mid 90's, the Stanford University
Bookstore still had SPARCstations as the machine they sold to students.

On Fri, Apr 9, 2021 at 10:10 AM Tom Lyon <pugs at ieee.org> wrote:

> Prior to Sun, Andy had a company called VLSI Technology, Inc. which
> licensed SUN designs to 5-10 companies, including Forward Technology and
> CoData, IIRC.  The SUN IPR effectively belonged to Andy, but I don't know
> what kind of legal arrangement he had with Stanford.   But the design was
> not generally public, and relied on CAD tools only extant on the Stanford
> PDP-10.  Cisco did start with the SUN-1 processor, though whether they got
> it from Andy or direct from Stanford is not known to me.  When Cisco
> started (1984), the Sun-1 was long dead already at Sun.
>
> After both Sun and Cisco, Stanford got serious about holding on to IPR.
>
> On Thu, Apr 8, 2021 at 10:12 PM Jason Stevens <
> jsteve at superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:
>
>> Is there any solid info on the Stanford SUN boards?  I just know the SUN-1
>> was based around them, but they aren't the same thing?  And apparently
>> cisco
>> used them as well but 'borrowed' someone's RTOS design as the basis for
>> IOS?
>> There was some lawsuit and Stanford got cisco network gear for years for
>> free but they couldn't take stock for some reason?
>>
>> I see more and more of these CP/M SBC's on ebay/online and it seems odd
>> that
>> there is no 'DIY' SUN boards... Or were they not all that open, hence why
>> they kind of disappeared?
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jon Steinhart
>> To: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org
>> Sent: 4/8/21 7:04 AM
>> Subject: Re: [TUHS] PC Unix
>>
>> Larry McVoy writes:
>> > On Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 12:18:04AM +0200, Thomas Paulsen wrote:
>> > > >From: John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com>
>> > > >Sun was making 68000-based systems in 1981, before the IBM PC was
>> created.
>> > >
>> > > Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. The Sun-1 was launched in May
>> 1982.
>> > >
>> > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems
>> > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1
>> >
>> > John may be sort of right, I bet avb was building 68k machines at
>> > Stanford before SUN was founded.  Sun stood for Stanford University
>> > Network I believe.
>> >
>> > --lm
>>
>> Larry is correct.  I remember visiting a friend of mind, Gary Newman,
>> who was working at Lucasfilm in '81.  He showed me a bunch of stuff
>> that they were doing on Stanford University Network boards.
>>
>> Full disclosure, it was Gary and Paul Rubinfeld who ended up at DEC
>> and I believe was the architect for the microVax who told me about
>> the explorer scout post at BTL which is how I met Heinz.
>>
>> Jon
>>
>
>
> --
> - Tom
>
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