Prior to Sun, Andy had a company called VLSI Technology, Inc. which
licensed SUN designs to 5-10 companies, including Forward Technology and
CoData, IIRC.  The SUN IPR effectively belonged to Andy, but I don't know
what kind of legal arrangement he had with Stanford.   But the design was
not generally public, and relied on CAD tools only extant on the Stanford
PDP-10.  Cisco did start with the SUN-1 processor, though whether they got
it from Andy or direct from Stanford is not known to me.  When Cisco
started (1984), the Sun-1 was long dead already at Sun.

After both Sun and Cisco, Stanford got serious about holding on to IPR.

On Thu, Apr 8, 2021 at 10:12 PM Jason Stevens <
jsteve@superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:

> Is there any solid info on the Stanford SUN boards?  I just know the SUN-1
> was based around them, but they aren't the same thing?  And apparently
> cisco
> used them as well but 'borrowed' someone's RTOS design as the basis for
> IOS?
> There was some lawsuit and Stanford got cisco network gear for years for
> free but they couldn't take stock for some reason?
>
> I see more and more of these CP/M SBC's on ebay/online and it seems odd
> that
> there is no 'DIY' SUN boards... Or were they not all that open, hence why
> they kind of disappeared?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Steinhart
> To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
> Sent: 4/8/21 7:04 AM
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] PC Unix
>
> Larry McVoy writes:
> > On Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 12:18:04AM +0200, Thomas Paulsen wrote:
> > > >From: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
> > > >Sun was making 68000-based systems in 1981, before the IBM PC was
> created.
> > >
> > > Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. The Sun-1 was launched in May
> 1982.
> > >
> > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems
> > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1
> >
> > John may be sort of right, I bet avb was building 68k machines at
> > Stanford before SUN was founded.  Sun stood for Stanford University
> > Network I believe.
> >
> > --lm
>
> Larry is correct.  I remember visiting a friend of mind, Gary Newman,
> who was working at Lucasfilm in '81.  He showed me a bunch of stuff
> that they were doing on Stanford University Network boards.
>
> Full disclosure, it was Gary and Paul Rubinfeld who ended up at DEC
> and I believe was the architect for the microVax who told me about
> the explorer scout post at BTL which is how I met Heinz.
>
> Jon
>


-- 
- Tom