Solbourne Computer

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Solbourne Computer Inc. was a vendor of computer systems based in Longmont, Colorado, USA, funded by Matsushita. In the late 1980s and early '90s, the company produced a range of computer workstations and servers based on the SPARC microprocessor architecture, largely compatible with Sun Microsystems' Sun-4 systems. Some of these were notable for supporting symmetric multiprocessing some time before Sun themselves produced multiprocessor systems.

In 1994, Solbourne left the computer hardware business, with Grumman Systems Support Corporation taking over support for Solbourne customers until 2000. Since 1994, Solbourne has been headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, and provides consulting services and solutions based on Oracle Applications and technologies.

[edit] Models

Solbourne's range comprised the following:

Multiprocessor workstations and servers using the KBus 64-bit inter-processor bus:
- Series4: 16.67 MHz Fujitsu MB86900 processor(s)
- Series5: 33 MHz Cypress CY7C601 processor(s)
- Series5e: 40 MHz Cypress CY7C601 processor(s)
- Series6: 33 MHz SuperSPARC processor(s)
- Series6E: 50 MHz SuperSPARC processor(s)

Single-processor IDT (Integrated DeskTop) workstations based on the Panasonic MN10501 KAP SPARC-compatible processor:
- S3000: portable workstation with integrated plasma display
- S4000: 33MHz CPU "pizza-box"-style desktop workstation
- S4000DX: 36 MHz S4000 with secondary processor cache

[edit] Operating systems

All Solbourne systems ran OS/MP, a modified version of SunOS 4.1 supporting multiprocessor systems. The final release of OS/MP was 4.1C, corresponding to SunOS 4.1.3.

Some work has also been done recently in porting OpenBSD to Solbourne IDT workstations.