Solbourne Computer, Inc. was originally a vendor of computer systems based in

Longmont, Colorado Longmont is a home rule municipality located in Boulder and Weld counties, Colorado, United States. Its population was 98,885 . Longmont is located northeast of the county seat of Boulder. It is named after Longs Peak, a prominent mountain th ...

, United States, at first 52% owned by Matsushita. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the company produced a range of

computer 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 and servers based on the SPARC

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor (computing), processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, a ...

architecture, largely compatible with

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 ...

Sun-4 Sun-4 is a series of Unix workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, first appearing in July 1987, with the launch of the Sun 4/260. The original Sun-4 series were VMEbus-based systems similar to the earlier Sun-3 series, but employi ...

systems. Some of these are notable for supporting

symmetric multiprocessing Symmetric multiprocessing or shared-memory multiprocessing (SMP) involves a multiprocessor computer hardware and software architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single, shared main memory, have full access to all ...

some time before Sun themselves produced multiprocessor systems. Even when Sun produced multiprocessor systems, SunOS uses an

asymmetric multiprocessing An asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP or ASMP) system is a multiprocessor computer system where not all of the multiple interconnected central processing units (CPUs) are treated equally. For example, a system might allow (either at the hardware or op ...

model rather than OS/MP's symmetric multiprocessing model; Sun would not adopt symmetric multiprocessing until the release of

Solaris Solaris is the Latin word for sun. It may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Sol ...

2.0 in 1992. Due to the cost of engineering and producing new systems to compete with Sun's increasingly competitive hardware offerings and the loss of symmetric multiprocessing as a distinguishing feature, in 1994, Solbourne left the computer hardware business, with

Grumman The Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, later Grumman Aerospace Corporation, was a 20th century American producer of military and civilian aircraft. Founded on December 6, 1929, by Leroy Grumman and his business partners, it merged in 19 ...

Systems Support Corporation taking over support for Solbourne customers until 2000. In 1994, Walt Pounds assumed the role of CEO of Solbourne, and the Solbourne headquarters were moved to Boulder, Colorado. From that point until July 2008, Solbourne focused on providing consulting services and solutions based on

Oracle Applications Oracle Applications comprise the applications software or business software of the Oracle Corporation both in the cloud and on-premises. The term refers to the non-database and non-middleware parts. The suite of applications includes enterprise re ...

and associated technologies. Solbourne established a strong reputation in the Oracle E-Business Suite community, and became a dominant provider of consulting services to state and local Oracle E-Business Suite customers. On July 11, 2008, Solbourne closed a transaction to sell substantially all of the company assets to

Deloitte Consulting Deloitte is a multinational professional services network based in London, United Kingdom. It is the largest professional services network in the world by revenue and number of employees, and is one of the Big Four accounting firms, along wit ...

. The Solbourne management team and more than 100 professionals joined Deloitte's Enterprise Applications, Technology Integration and Human Capital service areas.

Models

Solbourne's range comprises the following: *

Multiprocessor Multiprocessing (MP) is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. The ...

workstations and servers using the KBus

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, a ...

inter-processor bus: ** Series4: 16.67 MHz Fujitsu MB86900 processor(s) ** Series5: 33 MHz

Cypress Cypress is a common name for various coniferous trees or shrubs from the ''Cupressus'' genus of the '' Cupressaceae'' family, typically found in temperate climates and subtropical regions of Asia, Europe, and North America. The word ''cypress'' ...

CY7C601 processor(s) ** Series5e: 40 MHz Cypress CY7C601 processor(s) ** Series6: 33 MHz SuperSPARC processor(s) ** Series6E: 50 MHz SuperSPARC processor(s) * Single-processor IDT (Integrated DeskTop) workstations based on the Panasonic MN10501 KAP SPARC-compatible processor: ** S3000: portable workstation with integrated

plasma display A plasma display panel is a type of flat-panel display that uses small cells containing Plasma (physics), plasma: Ionization, ionized gas that responds to electric fields. Plasma televisions were the first large (over diagonal) flat-panel displ ...

** S4000: 33 MHz CPU "pizza-box"-style desktop workstation ** S4000DX: 36 MHz S4000 with secondary processor cache The MN10501 processor had been developed by Solbourne in association with Matsushita, providing a single-chip product featuring an integrated floating-point arithmetic unit,

memory management Memory management (also dynamic memory management, dynamic storage allocation, or dynamic memory allocation) is a form of Resource management (computing), resource management applied to computer memory. The essential requirement of memory manag ...

hardware,

branch prediction In computer architecture, a branch predictor is a digital circuit that tries to guess which way a branch (e.g., an if–then–else structure) will go before this is known definitively. The purpose of the branch predictor is to improve the flow ...

logic, 8 KB of

cache memory In computing, a cache ( ) is a hardware or software component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsew ...

, a 64-bit

data bus In computer architecture, a bus (historically also called a data highway or databus) is a communication system that transfers data between components inside a computer or between computers. It encompasses both hardware (e.g., wires, optical ...

, and "mostly 64-bit data paths on chip".

Operating systems

All Solbourne systems run OS/MP, a modified version of

SunOS SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems from 1982 until the mid-1990s. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based ...

4.1 supporting multiprocessor systems. The final release of OS/MP was 4.1D, corresponding to SunOS 4.1.3. , some work has been done in

porting In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desig ...

OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused operating system, security-focused, free software, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by fork (software development), forking NetBSD ...

to Solbourne IDT workstations.

References

External links

Deloitte Consulting and Solbourne

Solbourne corporate website

Solbourne Shack Web Page (archive.org copy)

Floodgap Solbourne Solace
(with another copy of the Solbourne Shack pages) 2008 mergers and acquisitions American companies established in 1986 American companies disestablished in 2008 Computer companies established in 1986 Computer companies disestablished in 2008 Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct computer systems companies SPARC microprocessor products {{US-manufacturing-company-stub