SPARCstation 1
Early 90s personal computer
The SPARCstation 1 (Sun 4/60, code-named Campus) is the first of the SPARCstation series of SPARC-based workstations sold by Sun Microsystems. The design originated in 1987 by a Sun spin-off company, UniSun, which was soon re-acquired. The SPARCstation 1 has a distinctive slim enclosure (a square 3-inch-high "pizza box") and was first announced in April 1989; the first units shipped in July that year.
Based on an LSI Logic RISC CPU running at 20 MHz, with a Weitek 3170 (or 3172) FPU coprocessor, it was the fourth Sun computer (after the 4/260, 4/110 and 4/280) to use the SPARC architecture and the first of the sun4c architecture. The motherboard has three SBus slots, built-in AUI Ethernet, 8 kHz audio, and a 5 MB/s SCSI-1 bus. The basic display runs at 1152 × 900 in 256 colours, and monitors shipped with the computer were 16 to 19 inch greyscale or colour. Sun released the SPARCstation 1+, an upgrade to the SPARCstation 1 which increased the clock speed of the CPU to 25 MHz among other hardware improvements, in 1990.
Designed for ease of production to compete with high-end PCs or Macs, its principal competitors were the IBM PS/2 Model 80, the NeXT Computer, and Sun's own 3/80. It sold for between about US$8,995, with no hard disks, to US$15,400 with a hard disk (equivalent to $23,363–39,999 in 2025). Within the first 18 months of its introduction, over 120,000 units were sold.
The public source identifies “SPARCstation 1” as early 90s personal computer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around SPARCstation, Early and personal.
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This entry incorporates text from “SPARCstation 1” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.