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

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

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 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 VAX (an acronym for virtual address extension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The V ...

series of

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of general-purpose computer mostly developed from the mid-1960s, built significantly smaller and sold at a much lower price than mainframe computers . By 21st century-standards however, a mini is ...

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 is a Japanese multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered at Sony City in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The Sony Group encompasses various businesses, including Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Semiconductor Solutions (i ...

'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 joine ...

, 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 dedicated 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 co ...

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, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced ...

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, Inc. (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. ...

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 owned and produced by Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), a division of Japanese conglomerate Sony. Its flagship products consists of a series of home video game consoles produced under the brand; it also consists ...

development kits were based on Sony NEWS hardware, with added Playstation hardware.

Nintendo is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto. It develops, publishes, and releases both video games and video game consoles. The history of Nintendo began when craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi ...

also developed its first-party

Super NES The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, commonly shortened to Super Nintendo, Super NES or SNES, is a 16-bit home video game console developed by Nintendo that was released in 1990 in Japan, 1991 in North America, 1992 in Europe and Oceania a ...

titles on Sony NEWS hardware. The Sony NEWS was unable to break into the U.S. market, where

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 ...

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 ( 68020 or 68030) 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 and MIPS IV 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 microprocesso ...

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 imp ...

, R4400,

R4600 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 ...

, R4700, 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 Ro ...

. 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 3 1/2" micro-diskette 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 switch A DIP switch is a manual electric switch that is packaged with others in a group in a standard dual in-line package (DIP). The term may refer to each individual switch, or to the unit as a whole. This type of switch is designed to be used on a p ...

es 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, and a keyboard.

Software

NEWS-OS

Originally, the Sony NEWS team had to decide which version of Unix to use:

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

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 communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

. Eventually BSD was chosen because they believed that

computer network A computer network is a collection of communicating computers and other devices, such as printers and smart phones. In order to communicate, the computers and devices must be connected by wired media like copper cables, optical fibers, or b ...

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 (also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by the Japanese company ASCII Corporation in conjunction with Microsoft and standardized as JIS ...

, 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 originally implemented the

Ruby programming language Ruby is a general-purpose programming language. It was designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity. In Ruby, everything is an object, including primitive data types. It was developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Mat ...

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 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.x, and finally to

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

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

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

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
webpage about SONY NEWS 1580(web archive)
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