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