SuperSPARC

A little classic computing trivia to finish the week. Above you will see an original SuperSparc microprocessor. This implemented the SPARC V8 instruction set architecture developed by Sun. The question is, what year was this introduced? To help narrow it down, I will tell you that there were 33 and 40 MHz versions. The answer is below.

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The year was 1992 friends. Bill Clinton was elected president, Microsoft released Windows 3.1, gas was $1.05/gallon, the Space Shuttle Endeavour made its maiden voyage, hurricane Andrew hit Florida, and the Cartoon Network was launched.

We can narrow this particular chip down pretty close to that date as well. It was updated as the SuperSPARC+ to fix some design flaws fairly quickly. And the major revision, SuperSPARC-II was introduced in 1994, which jumped all the way to 85 and 90MHz.

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