3M was a goal first proposed in the early 1980s by

Raj Reddy Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy (born 13 June 1937) is an Indian-American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award. He is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mello ...

and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a minimum specification for academic/technical

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: at least a '' megabyte'' of memory, a ''

megapixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device. In most digital display devices, pixels are the sm ...

'' display and a ''

million instructions per second Instructions per second (IPS) is a measure of a computer's processor speed. For complex instruction set computers (CISCs), different instructions take different amounts of time, so the value measured depends on the instruction mix; even for co ...

'' (MIPS) processing power. It was also often said that it should cost no more than a "''megapenny''" (). 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 team ...

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 designed from its inception to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface (GUI), later using the desktop metaphor. The first machines were introduced on 1 March 1973, a decade before mass-market ...

which had been designed in the 1970s at the

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from Sta ...

. Several Altos were donated to CMU, Stanford, and MIT in 1979. An early 3M computer was the

PERQ The PERQ, also referred to as the Three Rivers PERQ or ICL PERQ, was a pioneering workstation computer produced in the late 1970s through the early 1980s. In June 1979, the company took its very first order from the UK's Rutherford Appleton La ...

Workstation made by

Three Rivers Computer Corporation The Three Rivers Computer Corporation (3RCC) was a spinoff from the Research Engineering Laboratory of the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University, and was founded in May 1974 by Brian S. Rosen, James R. Teter, William H. Broadl ...

. The PERQ had 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. 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 The SUN workstation was a modular computer system designed at Stanford University in the early 1980s. It became the seed technology for many commercial products, including the original workstations from Sun Microsystems. History In 1979 Xerox do ...

, designed by Andy Bechtolsheim in 1980, is another example. It was then commercialized by Sun Microsystems in 1982.

Apollo Computer Apollo Computer Inc., founded in 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer) and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo ...

(in the

Route 128 The following highways are numbered 128: Canada * New Brunswick Route 128 * Ontario Highway 128 (former) * Prince Edward Island Route 128 Costa Rica * National Route 128 India * National Highway 128 (India) Japan * Japan National Route 128 ...

region) announced the

Apollo/Domain Apollo/Domain was a range of workstations developed and produced by Apollo Computer from circa 1980 to 1989. The machines were built around the Motorola 68k family of processors, except for the DN10000, which had from one to four of Apollo's RIS ...

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 lab A computer lab is a space where computer services are provided to a defined community. These are typically public libraries and academic institution Academic institution is an educational institution dedicated to education and research, which ...

s. 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 hig ...

was introduced in 1988 as a 3M machine by Steve Jobs, who first heard this term at Brown University. Its so-called "

MegaPixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device. In most digital display devices, pixels are the sm ...

" display had just over (with 2 bits per pixel). However, floating point performance, powered with the Motorola 68882 FPU was only about . Modern desktop computers exceed the 3M memory and speed requirements by many thousands of times, however screen pixels are only 2 (in the case of

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 screen ve ...

) to 8 (in the case of 4K) times larger (but 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