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The3M computer industrial goal was first proposed in the early 1980s byRaj Reddy and his colleagues atCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a minimum specification for academic and technicalworkstations. It requires at least onemegabyte of memory, a onemegapixel display with 1024×1024 1-bit pixels, and one millioninstructions per second (MIPS) of processing power.[1] It was also often said that it should cost no more than one "megapenny" or$10,000 (equivalent to $38,000 in 2024).[2][3][4]
At that time, a typical desktop computer such as an earlyIBM Personal Computer might have 1/8 of a megabyte of memory (128K), 1/4 of a million pixels (640 × 400 monochrome display), and run at 1/3 million instructions per second (5 MHz 8088).
The concept was inspired by theXerox Alto which had been designed in the 1970s at theXerox Palo Alto Research Center. Several Alto workstations were donated to CMU, Stanford, and MIT in 1979.
An early 3M computer is thePERQ Workstation made byThree Rivers Computer Corporation.[5] It has a 1 millionP-codes (Pascal instructions) per second processor,[6] 256 KB of RAM (upgradeable to 1 MB), and a 768×1024 pixel display on a 15-inch (380 mm) display.[7] Though 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.
TheStanford University NetworkSUN workstation, designed byAndy Bechtolsheim in 1980, is another example.[2][8][9] It was then commercialized bySun Microsystems in 1982.[8][9]Apollo Computer (in theRoute 128 region) announced theApollo/Domain computer in 1981.[9] 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$3,000 and retail pricing of$5,000, and Stanford University planned to deploy them incomputer labs.[10] The first "megapenny" 3M workstation was theSun-2/50diskless desktop workstation with a list price of$8,900 in 1986.
The originalNeXT Computer was introduced in 1988 as a 3M machine bySteve Jobs, who first heard this term atBrown University.[11] TheNeXT MegaPixel Display has just over930,000 pixels with 2 bits per pixel.[12] However,floating-point performance, powered with the Motorola68882 FPU is only about0.25 megaflops.[13]
Modern desktop computers exceed the 3M memory and speed requirements by many thousands of times, however1080p screen pixels are only 2 times larger and4K 8 times larger, but they are full color so each pixel uses at least 24 times as many bits.
In the early 1980sRaj Reddy and his colleagues atCMU coined the term '3M Machine'.
