The Sony NEWS ("Network Engineering Workstation", later "NetWorkStation") is a series of

Unix workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or 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 systems. The term ''workstat ...

s sold during the late 1980s and 1990s. The first NEWS machine was the NWS-800, which originally appeared in Japan in January 1987 and was conceived as a desktop replacement for the VAX series of

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ' ...

s.SONY History 第12章苦闘する新分野への進出第2話社内ベンチャーから生まれた「NEWS」
- Sony official Web site　(Japanese)

History

1980s

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

's NEWS project leader,

Toshitada Doi is a Japanese electrical engineer, who played a significant role in the digital audio revolution. He received a degree in electrical engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1964, and a PhD from Tohoku University in 1972. He joined ...

, originally wanted to develop a computer for business applications, but his engineers wanted to develop a replacement for minicomputers running Unix that they preferred to use: Initial development of the NEWS was completed in 1986 after only one year of development. It launched at a lower price than competitors (–16,300), and it outperformed conventional minicomputers. After a successful launch, the line expanded and the new focus for the NEWS became

desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online ...

and

CAD/CAM CAD/CAM refers to the integration of Computer-aided design (CAD) and Computer-aided manufacturing (CAM). Both of these require powerful computers. ''CAD'' software helps designers and draftsmen; ''CAM'' "reduces manpower costs" in the manufacturi ...

1990s

In 1991, Sony broadened the NEWS range with the 3250 portable workstation, reportedly described in product literature as a laptop but weighing 18 pounds and having more in common with portable computers, being "designed to be set up on a desk and plugged in". Featuring an 11-inch monochrome liquid crystal display with a resolution of and keyboard with "75 full travel keys", the machine was fitted with an internal hard drive and a 3.5-inch floppy drive. A

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interface ...

port permitted the addition of other storage devices, and Ethernet, parallel and serial ports were provided, along with a mouse port and audio in/out ports for audio processing. In terms of its fundamental computing facilities, the system employed a 20 MHz MIPS R3000 CPU with R3010 floating-point coprocessor, offered 8 MB of RAM expandable to 36 MB, running an implementation of Unix System V Release 4 and providing an

Open Software Foundation The Open Software Foundation (OSF) was a not-for-profit industry consortium for creating an open standard for an implementation of the operating system Unix. It was formed in 1988 and merged with X/Open in 1996, to become The Open Group. Despit ...

Motif graphical environment. In the United States, a configuration with 240 MB hard drive cost $9,900, with the 406 MB configuration costing $11,900. Early

PlayStation is a video gaming brand that consists of five home video game consoles, two handhelds, a media center, and a smartphone, as well as an online service and multiple magazines. The brand is produced by Sony Interactive Entertainment, a di ...

development kits were based on Sony NEWS hardware, with added Playstation hardware. The Sony NEWS was unable to break into the U.S. market, where

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...

was dominant, and also did not fare well in Europe. The NEWS platform was later used for video-on-demand applications, and for Internet server applications. The NEWS division at Sony was dissolved in 1998.

Hardware

The Sony NEWS originally came equipped with a dual

680x0 The Motorola 68000 series (also known as 680x0, m68000, m68k, or 68k) is a family of 32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessors. During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations an ...

(

68020 The Motorola 68020 ("''sixty-eight-oh-twenty''", "''sixty-eight-oh-two-oh''" or "''six-eight-oh-two-oh''") is a 32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1984. A lower-cost version was also made available, known as the 68EC020. In keepi ...

68030 The Motorola 68030 ("''sixty-eight-oh-thirty''") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 family. It was released in 1987. The 68030 was the successor to the Motorola 68020, and was followed by the Motorola 68040. In keeping with gener ...

) processor configuration running at 16-25 MHz. Later, the Sony NEWS was moved to the

MIPS architecture MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, ...

, with

MIPS III MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, ...

and

MIPS IV MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, ...

microprocessors such as the

R3000 The R3000 is a 32-bit RISC microprocessor chipset developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implemented the MIPS I instruction set architecture (ISA). Introduced in June 1988, it was the second MIPS implementation, succeeding the R2000 as the flags ...

R4000 The R4000 is a microprocessor developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implements the MIPS III instruction set architecture (ISA). Officially announced on 1 October 1991, it was one of the first 64-bit microprocessors and the first MIPS III implem ...

, R4400, R4600,

R4700 The R4600, code-named "Orion", is a microprocessor developed by Quantum Effect Design (QED) that implemented the MIPS III instruction set architecture (ISA). As QED was a design firm that did not fabricate or sell their designs, the R4600 was fir ...

, and

R10000 The R10000, code-named "T5", is a RISC microprocessor implementation of the MIPS IV instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by MIPS Technologies, Inc. (MTI), then a division of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). The chief designers are Chris Rowe ...

. The fastest MIPS processors used in Sony NEWS workstations run at 200 MHz. Both 680x0 and MIPS models share the same case, which has a large door covering a floppy drive and a 5.25-in expansion bay, which can house a

tape or CD-ROM drive. The details of the door are slightly different: two windows for the 680x0 models, while the MIPS ones have a single large window. Also hidden by the cover are a reset button and a series of DIP switches used to configure some bootup parameters. On the back are 3 expansion slots, one of which normally houses a video card. Underneath those are connectors for

, network (an AUI connector), serial (CH0, normally used for console, and CH1),

parallel Parallel is a geometric term of location which may refer to: Computing * Parallel algorithm * Parallel computing * Parallel metaheuristic * Parallel (software), a UNIX utility for running programs in parallel * Parallel Sysplex, a cluster o ...

, and a keyboard.

Software

NEWS-OS

Originally the Sony NEWS team had to decide which version of Unix to use: BSD or AT&T System V. The project leader was interested in the potential commercial support for System V, but the engineering team preferred BSD because it had rich networking features, including

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the su ...

. Eventually BSD was chosen because they believed that

computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

s would be important in the future. NEWS-OS releases were based on three different versions of Unix: * NEWS-OS 1.x: 4.2BSD,

Shift JIS Shift JIS (Shift Japanese Industrial Standards, also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by a Japanese company called ASCII Corporation in conjuncti ...

, introduced in 1987 * NEWS-OS 2.x: 4.2BSD, Shift JIS, introduced in 1987 * NEWS-OS 3.x: 4.3BSD, EUC, introduced in 1988 * NEWS-OS 4.x: 4.3BSD, EUC, introduced in 1990 * NEWS-OS 5.x: SVR4.2, EUC, introduced in 1992 * NEWS-OS 6.x: SVR4.2, EUC, introduced in 1993 Prior to NEWS-OS 3.9, all versions of NEWS-OS were released exclusively for the 680x0 series of processors. NEWS-OS 3.9 was released in both CISC ("C") versions and RISC ("R") versions, for the 680x0 and the MIPS architecture, respectively. For example, NEWS-OS 3.9 was released as "NEWS-OS 3.9C" and "NEWS-OS 3.9R", with the same functionality in both the CISC and RISC versions. The NEWS-OS 4.x series was also released in both CISC and RISC versions.

Third-party software

Yukihiro Matsumoto , also known as Matz, is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language and its original reference implementation, Matz's Ruby Interpreter (MRI). His demeanor has brough ...

originally implemented the

Ruby programming language Ruby is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language which supports multiple programming paradigms. It was designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity. In Ruby, everything is an object, including p ...

on the 4.3BSD-based NEWS-OS 3.x, but later migrated his work to

SunOS SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based on BSD, while versions 5.0 an ...

4.x, and finally to

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

. In 1999, Ruby was known to work across many different

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s, including NEWS-OS.

References

External links

Sony History: NEWS – An Independent Venture

software repository for NEWS-OS 6.1
webpage about SONY NEWS 1580
webpage about Sony NEWS 1580

A version for th
RISC
version is also available.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sony News Berkeley Software Distribution Computer workstations MIPS architecture Sony hardware UNIX System V