Sun Microsystems Announces its First Workstation

In May 1982 SUN Microsystems announced its first UNIX workstation, the Sun 1. The company had been founded in Santa Clara, California only three months earlier, on February 24, 1982, by Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy—students at Stanford who worked on the Stanford University Network. 

"The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation,  was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation. It was designed as a 3M computer: 1 MIPS, 1 Megabyte and 1 Megapixel. It was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced Memory management unit (MMU) to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses" (Wikipedia article on Sun Microsystems, accessed 06-12-2009).