it possible to use standard enclosures, and to use circuit boards made by different vendors to create other configurations. For example, the CPU board combined with a multi-port serial controller created a terminal server (called a TIP, for Terminal Interface Processor) which connected many terminals to the Digital Equipment Corporation time-sharing systems at Stanford or anywhere on the Internet. Configuring multiple Ethernet controllers (including commercial ones, once they were available) with one CPU board created a router. William Yeager wrote the software, which was later adopted and evolved by Cisco Systems on its version of the hardware. Les Earnest licensed the CPU board for one of the first commercial low-cost laser printer controllers at a company called Imagen. The processor board was combined with a prototype high performance graphics display by students of James H. Clark. That group later formed Silicon Graphics Incorporated. Eventually about ten SUN workstations were built during 1981 and 1982, after which Stanford declined to build any more. Bechtolsheim then licensed the hardware design to several vendors, but was frustrated that none of them had chosen to build a workstation. Vinod Khosla, also from Stanford, convinced Bechtolsheim along with Scott McNealy to found Sun Microsystems in order to build the Sun-1 workstation, which included some improvements to the earlier design. Other faculty members who did research using SUN workstations included David Cheriton, Brian Reid, and John Hennessy. See also NuMachine, a similar MIT project References External links History of computing hardware Sun Microsystems Stanford University Computer workstations 68k-based computers