3M computer

3M computer

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. [cite paper
first =
last =
author = Andries van Dam
authorlink = Andries van Dam
coauthors = David H. Laidlaw, Rosemary Michelle Simpson
title = Experiments in Immersive Virtual Reality for Scientific Visualization
version =
publisher = Computers & Graphics
date = 2002-08-04
url =
format =
id = doi|10.1016/S0097-8493(02)00113-9
accessdate = 2008-01-26
"In the early 1980s Raj Reddy and his colleagues at CMU coined the term '3M Machine'"
] 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 desktopworkstation with a list price of $8,900 (1986 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. [cite web
url = http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Whats_A_Megaflop?.txt
title = What's A Megaflop?
accessdate = 2008-01-26
author = Andy Hertzfeld
authorlink = Andy Hertzfeld
date = January 1983
work = Macintosh Stories
publisher = folklore.org
] 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.

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