Sun Microsystems 3/110 Motorola 68020 16.67MHz Unix Workstation 600-2051 VME

Sun Microsystems 3/110 Motorola 68020 16.67MHz Unix Workstation 600-2051 VME

The Sun Microsystems 3/110 is a personal Unix workstation from Sun's 3 series, codenamed "Prism," built around the Motorola 68020 processor running at 16.67 MHz. Introduced in the mid-to-late 1980s, the 3/110 was a self-contained desktop Unix platform designed for engineering, scientific, and technical computing. The unit on offer carries part number 600-2051-01 and bears manufacture dates of August 14, 1987 (base/power) and March 16, 1988 (system board).

Specifications & What's Included

• CPU: Motorola 68020 at 16.67 MHz
• Part Number: 600-2051-01 (Model 347)
• Code Name: Prism
• Video: 8-bit color framebuffer (cgfour), onboard, 1152 × 900 resolution
• Video output: large D-sub connector plus 4× BNC (Blue, Green, Red, Sync) with Reset
• Bus: VMEbus — 3 VME expansion slots
• Ethernet: AUI interface (D-sub), with NORM/DIAG toggle switch
• Serial Ports: 2× DB25 — Serial Port A and Serial Port B
• Keyboard/Mouse: integrated connector (D-sub)
• SCSI: onboard SCSI interface (labeled on rear panel)
• Operating System: compatible with SunOS 3.0 through SunOS 4.1.1U1 (OS not included)
• Power: dual-voltage 115/230V AC, 60/50 Hz, 12/6A; fuse 250V 15/6A Slo
• Power panel: rocker ON/OFF switch, IEC AC inlet, AC pass-through outlet, fuse holder with green indicator
• Manufacture Date (base/power): August 14, 1987
• Manufacture Date (system board): March 16, 1988
• Country of Manufacture: United States
• Form Factor: tower on pedestal base
• Included: workstation unit only — no keyboard, mouse, monitor, or OS media

Applications

The Sun 3 series represented Sun Microsystems' second generation of Unix workstations, bridging the company's earliest MULTIBUS-based designs and the later SPARC-based Sun 4 architecture. The 3/110, as an entry-level tower in the lineup, targeted engineers, scientists, and university computing departments that needed a dedicated single-user Unix environment without a large shared-time server. It ran SunOS — Sun's BSD Unix derivative — and supported NFS networking, making it a building block in distributed computing environments of the late 1980s. The Motorola 68020 was the dominant processor for high-performance personal workstations of that era, used across Sun, Apollo, HP, and NeXT systems before RISC architectures took over. The cgfour framebuffer provided 8-bit color at the then-standard Sun resolution of 1152 × 900, compatible with Sun's proprietary CRT monitors via the BNC RGB connection. The VMEbus expansion slots allowed peripherals such as additional memory, accelerators, and I/O cards to be added. Today the Sun 3/110 is sought by vintage computing collectors and Unix historians, and occasionally by engineers maintaining legacy software or hardware that was originally certified on SunOS 3.x or 4.x.