Sunrise – How a Single University Project Kickstarted New Technologies
The birthplace of Sun Microsystems is Stanford University in California. In 1982, Andy von Bechtolsheim designed a Motorola 68000-based CPU board that was intended to be the base of a workstation for the Stanford University Network "SUN". This rather simple system was not used in Stanford, but also licensed to interested companies. As a result, not only Sun Microsystems with their Sun-1 workstation, but also other well-known companies, such as Silicon Graphics, Cisco, and a number of smaller companies, built their first generation products based on von Bechtolsheim's invention. In this talk, I will give an overview of the history, architecture, and impact of the Sun-1 board. Based on this, we will take a detailed look at what it takes to run a Unix system on a Motorola 68000-based system that did not use any custom components. Some of the complications that showed up were refreshing the DRAM and enabling virtual memory. This talk will accordingly discuss the ingenious tricks used to make the Sun-1 a Unix machine and will also discuss the limitations of the approaches used.
Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/