3M was a goal 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. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

(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 ''worksta ...

s: at least a ''

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 o ...

'' 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 ...

'' 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 c ...

'' (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 tea ...

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 G ...

which had been designed in the 1970s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Several Altos were donated to CMU, Stanford, and MIT in 1979. An early 3M computer was the PERQ Workstation made by Three Rivers Computer Corporation. 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 The Stanford University Network, also known as SUN, SUNet or SU-Net is the campus computer network for Stanford University. History Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four or ...

SUN workstation, designed by Andy Bechtolsheim in 1980, is another example. It was then commercialized by

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, ...

in 1982. Apollo Computer (in the Route 128 region) announced the Apollo/Domain 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 institutions. Generally, users must follow a certain user policy to retain access to the computers. This us ...

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 was introduced in 1988 as a 3M machine by

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, industrial designer, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; ...

, 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 ...

" 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) 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