How a Single University Project Started Everything

If we care to cast an eye over the history of ubiquitous personal computing as we know it today, we might immediately point at the original IBM PC. How a Single University Project Started Everything. After all, for most of us our machines share backward compatibility in some form through multiple generations back to that original box from 1981.

But if we look at the things we use today and take for granted, from laser printers to graphics cards to the routers which power most of the Internet, they’re not from IBM at all. At the recent Vintage Computing Festival Berlin, [Michael Engel] delivered a talk naming a surprising progenitor for much of that technology, none other than Sun Microsystems. It all starts with [Andy Bechtolsheim], famously Sun’s co-founder, when at the end of the 1970s he was a postgraduate at Stanford University.

Working on the Stanford University Network — SUN — project he designed a computer to be used as a workstation on the network. The processor of choice then was Motorola’s 68000, but it lacked the MMU that would be required to run UNIX. His design had an MMU implemented externally to the 68000, with a bank of SRAM serving as the page table.