The first prototype was ready in just six months. By October 1986, the project was announced, and in January 1987, the first NEWS workstation, the NWS 800 series, officially launched. It ran 4.2BSD UNIX and featured a Motorola 68020 CPU. Its performance rivaled that of traditional super minicomputers, but with a dramatically lower price point ranging from ¥950,000 to ¥2.75 million (approximately $6,555 to $18,975 USD in 1987). Competing UNIX workstations typically cost closer to ¥10 million (around $69,000 USD). NEWS caught on quickly in universities and R&D labs, where cost sensitive researchers needed real performance. The venture team had invested ¥400 million into development (about $2.76 million USD), and remarkably, they recouped those costs within just two months of launch.
That same year, Sony introduced a lower cost version called POP NEWS (PWS 1550). With a GUI shell named NEWS Desk, a document sharing format called CDFF (Common Document File Format), and a focus on Japanese language desktop publishing, PopNEWS aimed to make UNIX more accessible to general business users. Targeted at the Desktop Publishing market, it showed Sony’s desire to bridge consumer and professional segments in ways no other UNIX vendor was trying at the time.
↫ Obsolete Sony’s Newsletter
I’ve been fascinated by Sony’s NEWS workstations, and especially the NEWS-OS operating system, for a long time now. Real hardware is hard to find and prohibitively expensive, but some of these Sony NEWS workstations can be emulated through MAME. Sadly, as far as I can tell, you can only emulate NEWS-OS up to version 4.x, as I haven’t been able to find any information about emulating version 5.x and the final version, 6.x. If anyone knows anything about how to emulate these, if at all possible, please do share with the rest of us.
What’s interesting about Sony’s UNIX workstation efforts from the ’80s and ’90s is that they played an important role in the early development of the PlayStation. The early development kits for the PlayStation were modified NEWS workstations, with added PlayStation hardware. To further add to the importance of the NEWS line for gaming, Nintendo used them to develop several influential and popular first-party SNES titles, which isn’t surprising considering Nintendo and Sony originally worked together on bringing a CD-ROM drive to the SNES, which would later morph into the PlayStation as Nintendo cancelled the agreement at the last second.
I used some NEWS workstations when I was in a exchange program at uni in Japan.
I don’t recall the OS being particularly remarkable, mostly BSDish with a TWM window manager. And lots of support for Japanese language.
The HW was very nice, and it was one of the few Unix options with decent real time AV support (which was the context of their usage at that lab: as color video input for computer vision algorithms)
Japan had a lot of interesting domestic RISC/Unix machines developed in the 80s/90s that had little distribution internationally.
One of my favorites while I was working there was the Omron Luna (?), which was an early SMP RISC system running a Unix using Mach Microkernel.
IIRC, Japan’s Unixes had a lot of stolen IBM code, so international distribution was unlikely; and the various Japanese companies eventually paid IBM restitution.
Interesting. do you have any references about that?
https://youtu.be/ky1nGQhHTso?si=YCdJw4g6jATOvlYK
Where in that video backs up your claim regarding Unix?
Unix and IBM mainframe software are a bit different.
It was about this time that the 680X0 CPU lead to an explosion of UNIX workstations. There must have been dozens and dozens of different brands.
The 68k was somewhat of an “x86” of it’s era. Everyone wanted to use it, and it was a market leader. The rise of the x86 PC on the low end side, and the adoption of faster, disparate RISC architectures on the high end side signalled the death of the 68k. Had motorola not gone all in on PowerPC, we could all still be running m68k chips in our desktops today.
The 68k is dead, long live the 68k
x86 was the x86 of its era.
x86 had significantly larger market-share/revenue over the 68k historically.
Even though initially the 68000/68010 were objectively better CPUs than the 8086 or 80286.
Motorola only had a relatively tiny window where they were ahead architecturally (and thus why they enjoyed some relative popularity in the 1st half of the 80s).
Sadly, that advantage started to erode when both architectures moved onto full 32 bit implementations.
E.g. By the time the 386 came out, the 68020 was slightly behind (no integrated MMU, for example)
And from the 486 on, the 68K was basically 1/2 years behind x86.
Motorola had no choice but to go all in with PPC. For multiple reasons; their own RISC cpus (the 88K) were going nowhere (and had cannibalized the CISC 68K line), and their process tech was hopelessly behind by the late 80s and Motorola couldn’t afford financing further developments on their own.
First I learn about the PLEXUS and now I learn about Sony NEWS.
Just how many companies were making Unix workstations around the Motorola 68000 family of CPUs back in the day?
Semi-off-topic: The funny thing about PLEXUS workstations in particular is that while they were important enough to be purchased by Motorola, and while their workstations were unique in the sense they used two Motorola 68010 processors (one as a CPU and one as an I/O accelerator), very little public information exists about them.
All that exists is a brochure:
https://usermanual.wiki/Document/PlexusP15P20Brochure1985.1864982809/view
And a restoration video some guy made:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBprWU9cHXs
It makes you wonder how many other obscure UNIX workstations (and their equally obscure UNIX variants) exist out there.
If Sony made a UNIX variant and very few people noticed, it makes you wonder who else.
Absolutely tons. The 68k was quite a powerful and versatile chip. It shared a lot of ISA similarities with the PDP-11, meaning there were a lot of devs around who could pick up assembly development quite quickly. There was also a wide selection of off-the-shelf support chips, meaning rolling your own machine was quite trivial at the time.
Even Commodore released a Unix workstation, the 3000UX, a 68030 based workstation. I have one of these myself, but you wouldn’t want to run Commodore’s SYSV implementation as it’s dog slow. Apparently earlier releases of NetBSD run very well on them,though I’ve not found time to try it myself, yet.