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The move of personnel and equipment to the Research Center marked the beginning of the protracted struggle to commercialize the CCD.
Despite these circumstances, one computer launched in January 1987 was well received by the market. This was the NEWS (Network Engineering Workstation) system, an engineering workstation intended for use as an automated design tool like a CAD (Computer Aided Design) system. The workstation's development spun off from the MIPS Business Group and soon evolved into an independent venture business.
Twelve engineers unaffected by the mood within Sony to  stay away from those computer things developed NEWS from an original perspective. This highly cost-efficient system became popular among university and corporate laboratory researchers as a high-performance computer for the design, editing and development of software. At the time, the Japanese government was promoting the development of a workstation for just such a purpose, and NEWS was one of the first models to appear on the market.
The person who led the development of NEWS was former MIPS Business Group member Toshitada Doi, renowned for his expertise in the digital audio technology used in Sony's CD players. Though sales of MIPS products were suffering, Doi began dreaming about a computer that used a newly developed 32-bit CPU (Central Processing Unit). Unfortunately, MIPS was in the red and overloaded with projects. Doi summarized his ideas in a report and presented it to his boss but, as he expected, his boss was unimpressed. Doi was persistent. He went directly to Ohga. Unexpectedly, the project was approved immediately. Do it the way you think it should be done. But, there's one condition: the project must take the form of an independent venture. As the project did not comply with the MIPS group's concepts, Sony could ill afford to risk assigning to it too many personnel or a large budget.
However, the project was finally approved. Doi took four engineers with him from MIPS and another seven from the Research Center, starting the project in September 1985. The project was named ICKI (pronounced ikki) a combination of two Japanese words. In Japanese ikki means in one breath and was intended to refer to the engineers' hopes to complete the project in a short time. Iki means chic, a reflection of the team's aim to develop a trend-setting computer.
In the beginning, Doi's concept of the workstation was a device, which was essentially an extension of current MIPS projects. He saw it as consisting of a 32-bit CPU developed in a short time with unrestricted applications. Basically, he thought of it as an OA computer. However, the engineers Doi selected for his team did not listen to what Doi told them to do. They wanted to develop a workstation that could replace the VAX Super Mini Computer developed by Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC). This was a computer that the engineers often fought with each other to use while at MIPS because of the limited number. They wanted to develop something they themselves could use for their own day to day work. When Doi first learned of their intentions, he thought this was going to be a problem. The product had the potential of being rejected at the product commercialization stage, even if development could be completed. His engineers wanted to make an item that would have no relevance to Sony's line of AV products. Things did not look promising, yet Doi saw the excitement in his engineers' eyes and decided to go along with it.
Once the engineers reached a consensus, development progressed quickly. The hardware prototype took six months to build and the installation of the operating system took another six months. They knew exactly what they were aiming to develop; their single guiding concept was a distributed processing system. In other words, this computer would have to be able to connect to and be compatible with any machine using any system. Doi believed that gaining access to the CPU through a mainframe system would no longer be the only way. The day will come when a CPU with a powerful user interface will be placed on the desk of each employee, and the demand for users to freely connect their machines together to create an open workstation system will grow, he said. That's the only way that we'll be able to compete with IBM, he added. His fundamental principle was one machine per engineer. The size and production cost of the machine were considered accordingly.
After only a year of development, the NEWS system was announced in October 1986 and launched in January of the following year. NEWS used the UNIX OS (Operating System) and was capable of outperforming the conventional super mini computer, despite only being the size of a PC. It was priced between 950,000 and 2.75 million yen, a sensationally low price. At the time, the mainstream EWS (Engineering Workstation) cost approximately 10 million yen. NEWS was a very successful product, and it took only two months to recover the 400 million yen development cost. Doi's venture team was named the Supermicro Systems Group and its focus came to include DTP (Desktop Publishing) and CAD/CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) systems.
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The NWS-800 series was the first NEWS computer system. |
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However, Sony's competitors soon began targeting NEWS, and the market became increasingly competitive. NEWS could not break into the U.S. market where Sun Microsystems, Inc. had already established the industry standard and was dominating the market. Moreover, NEWS did not sell well in Europe either.
Although NEWS made slow but steady progress, it was many more years before it became one of Sony's key businesses. As information processing and telecommunications became more and more digital, Sony was ambitiously working to extend NEWS applications to become a server of video on demand (VOD) and Internet systems. Sony succeeded in developing Japan's first VOD system using NEWS, and in 1995 the system was installed as part of ACROS Fukuoka, a multi-use event facility. Since then, sales of the NEWS system steadily increased.
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