's NEWS project leader, Toshitada Doi, originally wanted to develop a computer for business applications, but his engineers wanted to develop a replacement for minicomputers running Unix that they preferred to use: Initial development of the NEWS was completed in 1986 after only one year of development. It launched at a lower price than competitors, and it outperformed conventional minicomputers. After a successful launch, the line expanded and the new focus for the NEWS became desktop publishing and CAD/CAM.
1990s
The Sony NEWS was unable to break into the U.S. market, where Sun Microsystems was dominant, and also did not fare well in Europe. The NEWS platform was later used for video-on-demand applications, and for Internet server applications. The NEWS division at Sony was dissolved in 1998.
Hardware
The Sony NEWS originally came equipped with a dual 680x0 processor configuration running at 16-25 MHz. Later, the Sony NEWS was moved to the MIPS architecture, with MIPS III and MIPS IV microprocessors such as the R3000, R4000, R4400, R4600, R4700, and R10000. The fastest MIPS processors used in Sony NEWS workstations ran at 200 MHz. Both 680x0 and MIPS models shared the same case, which had a large door covering a floppy drive and a 5.25-in expansion bay which could house a SCSI tape or CD-ROM drive. The details of the door were slightly different: two windows for the 680x0 models while the MIPS ones had a single large window. Also hidden by the cover were a reset button and a series of DIP switches used to configure some bootup parameters. On the back were 3 expansion slots, one of which normally housed a video card. Underneath those were the connectors for SCSI, network, serial, parallel, and a keyboard.
Software
NEWS-OS
Originally the Sony NEWS team had to decide which version of Unix to use: BSD or AT&T System V. The project leader was interested in the potential commercial support for System V, but the engineering team preferred BSD because it had rich networking features including TCP/IP. Eventually BSD was chosen because they believed that computer networks would be important in the future. NEWS-OS releases were based on three different versions of Unix:
NEWS-OS 1.x: 4.2BSD, Shift JIS, introduced in 1987.
NEWS-OS 2.x: 4.2BSD, Shift JIS, introduced in 1987.
Prior to version NEWS-OS 3.9, all versions of NEWS-OS were released exclusively for the 680x0 series of processors. NEWS-OS 3.9 was released in both CISC versions and RISC versions, for the 680x0 and the MIPS architecture, respectively. For example, NEWS-OS 3.9 was released as both "NEWS-OS 3.9C" and "NEWS-OS 3.9R." Functionality was the same between the CISC and RISC versions. The NEWS-OS 4.x series was also released in both CISC and RISC versions.
