3M computer

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This term is unrelated to the 3M Company.

3M was a goal first proposed in the early 1980s Raj Reddy and his colleagues at CMU as a minimum specification for academic/technical workstations: at least a megabyte of memory, a megapixel display and a Million instructions per second or MIPS processing power.[1] It was also often said that it should cost a Megapenny or $10,000. This was in contrast to the personal computers of that period, which might have 64K memory, a 320x200 display (64000 pixels), and 30 kiloFLOPS floating point performance.

The original 3M machine was the PERQ Workstation made by Three Rivers Computer Corporation. The PERQ was a Xerox Alto clone with a 1 million P-codes (Pascal instructions) per second processor, 256 Kb of ram, upgradable to 1 Mb, and a 768x1024 bit mapped display on a 15" CRT with portrait orientation. While not quite a true 3M machine, it was used as the initial 3m machine for the CMU Scientific Personal Integrated Computing Environment (SPICE) workstation project.

The Stanford University Network SUN workstation designed by Andy Bechtolsheim while a graduate student there is another example of an early 3M workstation.

The first Megapenny 3M workstation was the Sun2/50 diskless desktop workstation with a list price of $8,900 (1996 US price list).

The original NeXT Computer was introduced in 1988 as a 3M machine by Steve Jobs, who first heard this term at Brown University.[2] However, even though the monitor was dubbed the "MegaPixel" display, it actually fell slightly short of a true megapixel resolution at 930,000 pixels, and floating point performance was about .25 megaFLOPS.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Andries van Dam; David H. Laidlaw, Rosemary Michelle Simpson (August 4, 2002). "Experiments in Immersive Virtual Reality for Scientific Visualization". . Computers & Graphics. doi:10.1016/S0097-8493(02)00113-9  Retrieved on 2008-01-26. "In the early 1980s Raj Reddy and his colleagues at CMU coined the term '3M Machine'"
  2. ^ Andy Hertzfeld (January 1983). What's A Megaflop?. Macintosh Stories. folklore.org. Retrieved on 2008-01-26.