The 3M computer industrial goal was first proposed in the early 1980s by Raj Reddy and his colleagues at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

(CMU) as a minimum specification for academic and technical

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

s. It requires at least one

megabyte The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes ...

of memory, a one

megapixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a Raster graphics, raster image, or the smallest addressable element in a dot matrix display device. In most digital display devices, p ...

display with 1024×1024 1-bit pixels, and one million

instructions per second Instructions per second (IPS) is a measure of a computer's Central processing unit, processor speed. For complex instruction set computers (CISCs), different Machine code, instructions take different amounts of time, so the value measured depen ...

(MIPS) of processing power. It was also often said that it should cost no more than one "megapenny" or .1990,

Eric S. Raymond Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar''. He wrote a guidebook for the R ...

,
megapenny
',

Jargon File The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT AI Lab ...

2.2.1 (June 12, 1990) :*: (meg'a-pen'ee) n. $10,000 (1 cent * 10e6). Used semi-humorously as a unit in comparing computer cost/performance figures. At that time, a typical desktop computer such as an early

IBM Personal Computer The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible ''de facto'' standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a ...

might have 1/8 of a megabyte of memory (128K), 1/4 of a million pixels (640400 monochrome display), and run at 1/3 million instructions per second ( 8088). The concept was inspired by the

Xerox Alto The Xerox Alto is a computer system developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the 1970s. It is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers, and its development pioneered many aspects of modern computing. It featu ...

which had been designed in the 1970s at the

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Xerox Holdings Corporation (, ) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox was the pioneer of the photocopier market, beginning with the introduc ...

. Several Alto workstations were donated to CMU, Stanford, and MIT in 1979. An early 3M computer is the

PERQ The PERQ, also referred to as the Three Rivers PERQ or ICL PERQ, is a pioneering workstation computer produced in the late 1970s through the early 1980s. It is the first commercially-produced personal workstation with a graphical user interface ...

Workstation made by Three Rivers Computer Corporation. It has a 1 million P-codes ( Pascal instructions) per second processor, 256 KB of RAM (upgradeable to 1 MB), and a 768×1024 pixel display on a display.PERQ Publicity: ICL's PERQ Leaflets 1985
/ref> Though 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 in 1980, is another example. CSL Technical Report 229 (First author name is misspelled on cover) It was then commercialized by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

in 1982.

Apollo Computer Apollo Computer Inc. was an American technology corporation headquartered and founded in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1980 by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer) and others. Apollo Computer developed and produced Apoll ...

(in the Route 128 region) announced the

Apollo/Domain Apollo/Domain is a series of workstations that were developed and produced by Apollo Computer from to 1989. The machines were built around the Motorola 68k series of processors, except for the DN10000, which has from one to four of Apollo's RISC ...

computer in 1981. By 1986, CMU stated that it expected at least two companies to introduce 3M computers by the end of the year, with academic pricing of and retail pricing of , and Stanford University planned to deploy them in computer labs. The first "megapenny" 3M workstation was the Sun-2/50 diskless desktop workstation with a list price of in 1986. The original

NeXT Computer NeXT Computer (also called the NeXT Computer System) is a workstation computer that was developed, marketed, and sold by NeXT Inc. It was introduced in October 1988 as the company's first and flagship product, at a price of , aimed at the high ...

was introduced in 1988 as a 3M machine by

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder o ...

, who first heard this term at

Brown University Brown University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is the List of colonial colleges, seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the US, founded in 1764 as the ' ...

. The

NeXT MegaPixel Display The NeXT MegaPixel Display is a range of CRT-based computer monitors manufactured and sold by NeXT for the NeXTcube and NeXTstation workstations, designed by Hartmut Esslinger/ Frog Design Inc. Description The original MegaPixel Display relea ...

has just over with 2 bits per pixel. However,

floating-point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a ''significand'' (a Sign (mathematics), signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some Radix, base) multiplied by an integer power of that ba ...

performance, powered with the Motorola 68882 FPU is only about . Modern desktop computers exceed the 3M memory and speed requirements by many thousands of times, however

1080p 1080p (1920 × 1080 progressively displayed pixels; also known as Full HD or FHD, and BT.709) is a set of HDTV high-definition video modes characterized by 1,920 pixels displayed across the screen horizontally and 1,080 pixels down the sc ...

screen pixels are only 2 times larger and 4K 8 times larger, but they are full color so each pixel uses at least 24 times as many bits.

References

{{Carnegie Mellon History of computing hardware Carnegie Mellon University Computer workstations