1980s Sony'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 (–16,300), and it outperformed conventional minicomputers.
1990s In 1991, Sony broadened the NEWS range with the 3250 portable workstation, reportedly described in product literature as a laptop but weighing 18 pounds and having more in common with portable computers, being "designed to be set up on a desk and plugged in". Featuring an 11-inch monochrome liquid crystal display with a resolution of and keyboard with "75 full travel keys", the machine was fitted with an internal hard drive and a 3.5-inch floppy drive. A
SCSI port permitted the addition of other storage devices, and Ethernet, parallel and serial ports were provided, along with a mouse port and audio in/out ports for audio processing. In terms of its fundamental computing facilities, the system employed a 20 MHz MIPS R3000 CPU with R3010 floating-point coprocessor, offered 8 MB of RAM expandable to 36 MB, running an implementation of Unix System V Release 4 and providing an
Open Software Foundation Motif graphical environment. In the United States, a configuration with 240 MB hard drive cost $9,900, with the 406 MB configuration costing $11,900. Early
PlayStation development kits were based on Sony NEWS hardware, with added PlayStation hardware.
Nintendo also developed its first-party
Super NES titles on Sony NEWS hardware. 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==