Sun Microsystems
Encyclopedia
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California
(part of Silicon Valley
), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center
.
On January 27, 2010, Sun was acquired
by Oracle Corporation
for US$7.4 billion, based on an agreement signed on April 20, 2009. The following month, Sun Microsystems, Inc. was merged with Oracle USA, Inc. to become Oracle America, Inc.
Sun products included computer server
s and workstation
s based on its own SPARC
processor
s as well as AMD
's Opteron
and Intel's Xeon
processors; storage
systems; and, a suite of software products including the Solaris operating system, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management
applications. Other technologies included the Java platform, MySQL
, and NFS.
Sun was a proponent of open systems in general and Unix
in particular, and a major contributor to open source
software. Sun's main manufacturing facilities were located in Hillsboro, Oregon
and Linlithgow
, Scotland.
The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation, the Sun-1
, was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim
when he was a graduate student at Stanford University
in Palo Alto, California. He originally designed the SUN workstation
for the Stanford University Network
communications project as a personal CAD workstation
. It was designed around the Motorola 68000
processor with an advanced Memory management unit
(MMU) to support the Unix
operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science
and Silicon Valley supply houses.
On February 24, 1982, Vinod Khosla
, Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy
, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy
of Berkeley, a primary developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution
(BSD), joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders.
The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network
. Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982.
Sun's initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol SUNW, for Sun Workstations (later Sun Worldwide). The symbol was changed in 2007 to JAVA; Sun stated that the brand awareness
associated with its Java platform better represented the company's current strategy.
Sun's logo, which features four interleaved copies
of the word sun, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt, also of Stanford. The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently redesigned so as to appear to stand on one corner and the color changed to purple.
, Sun began making much more money, and its shares rose dramatically. It also began spending much more, hiring workers and building itself out. Some of this was because of genuine demand, but much was from web start-up companies anticipating business that would never happen. In 2000, the bubble burst.
Sales in Sun's important hardware division went into free-fall as customers closed shop and auctioned off high-end servers.
Several quarters of steep losses led to executive departures, rounds of layoffs, and other cost cutting. In December 2001, the stock fell to the 1998, pre-bubble level of about $100. But it kept falling, faster than many other tech companies. A year later it had dipped below $10 (a tenth of what it was even in 1990) but bounced back to $20. In mid-2004, Sun closed their Newark, California
, factory and consolidated all manufacturing to Hillsboro, Oregon
.
That factory later closed, in 2006.
In 2004, Sun canceled two major processor projects which emphasized high instruction level parallelism
and operating frequency. Instead, the company chose to concentrate on processors optimized for multi-threading and multiprocessing
, such as the UltraSPARC T1
processor (codenamed "Niagara"). The company also announced a collaboration with Fujitsu
to use the Japanese company's processor chips in mid-range and high-end Sun servers. These servers were announced on April 17, 2007 as the M-Series, part of the SPARC Enterprise
series.
In February 2005, Sun announced the Sun Grid
, a grid computing
deployment on which it offers utility computing
services priced at US$1 per CPU/hour for processing and per GB/month for storage. This offering builds upon an existing 3,000-CPU server farm used for internal R&D for over 10 years, which Sun markets as being able to achieve 97% utilization. In August 2005, the first commercial use of this grid was announced for financial risk simulations which was later launched as its first Software as a Service
product.
In January 2005, Sun reported a net profit of $19 million for fiscal 2005 second quarter, for the first time in three years. This was followed by net loss of $9 million on GAAP
basis for the third quarter 2005, as reported on April 14, 2005. In January 2007, Sun reported a net GAAP profit of $126 million on revenue of $3.337 billion for its fiscal second quarter. Shortly following that news, it was announced that Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) would invest $700 million in the company.
Sun had engineering groups in Bangalore
, Beijing, Dublin, Grenoble
, Hamburg, Prague
, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv
, Tokyo, and Trondheim
.
In 2007–2008, Sun posted revenue of $13.8 billion and had $2 billion in cash. First-quarter 2008 losses were $1.68 billion; revenue fell 7% to $12.99 billion. Sun's stock lost 80% of its value November 2007 to November 2008, reducing the company's market value to $3 billion. With falling sales to large corporate clients, Sun announced plans to lay off 5,000 to 6,000 workers, or 15–18% of its work force. It expected to save $700 million to $800 million a year as a result of the moves, while also taking up to $600 million in charges.
High-level telecom control systems such as Operational Support Systems service predominantly used Sun equipment. This use is due mainly to the company basing its products around a mature and very stable version of the Unix
operating system and the support service that Sun provides.
s for the Sun-1
through Sun-3
computer series. The Sun-1 employed a 68000
CPU, the Sun-2
series, a 68010
. The Sun-3
series was based on the 68020
, with the later Sun-3x variant using the 68030
.
In 1987, the company began using SPARC, a processor architecture of its own design, in its computer systems, starting with the Sun-4
line. SPARC was initially a 32-bit
architecture until the introduction of the SPARC V9 architecture in 1995, which added 64-bit
extensions.
Sun has developed several generations of SPARC-based computer systems, including the SPARCstation
, Ultra
and Sun Blade series of workstations, and the SPARCserver, Netra
, Enterprise
and Sun Fire
line of servers.
In the early 1990s the company began to extend its product line to include large-scale symmetric multiprocessing
servers, starting with the four-processor SPARCserver 600MP. This was followed by the 8-processor SPARCserver 1000 and 20-processor SPARCcenter 2000, which were based on work done in conjunction with Xerox PARC
. In the late 1990s this transformation was accelerated by the acquisition of Cray Business Systems Division from Silicon Graphics
. Their 32-bit, 64-processor Cray Superserver 6400
, related to the SPARCcenter, led to the 64-bit Sun Enterprise 10000 high-end server (otherwise known as Starfire). In 2006, Sun has also ventured into the blade server
(high density rack-mounted systems) market with the Sun Blade
(distinct from the Sun Blade workstation).
In November 2005 Sun launched the UltraSPARC T1
, notable for its ability to concurrently run 32 threads of execution on 8 processor cores. Its intent was to drive more efficient use of CPU resources, which is of particular importance in data center
s, where there is an increasing need to reduce power and air conditioning demands, much of which comes from the heat generated by CPUs. The T1 was followed by the UltraSPARC T2
, which extended the number of threads per core from 4 to 8, and T2 Plus, which added the ability to have multiple T2 processors in one system. Sun has open sourced the design specifications of both the T1 and T2 processors via the OpenSPARC
project.
In April 2007, Sun released the SPARC Enterprise
server products, jointly designed by Sun and Fujitsu
and based on Fujitsu SPARC64 VI
and later processors. The M-class SPARC Enterprise systems include high-end reliability and availability features.
-based machine, the Sun386i
; this was designed to be a hybrid system, running SunOS but at the same time supporting DOS applications. This only remained on the market for a brief time. A follow-up "486i" upgrade was announced but only a few prototype units were ever manufactured.
Sun's brief first foray into x86 systems ended in the early 1990s, as it decided to concentrate on SPARC and retire the last Motorola systems and 386i products, a move dubbed by McNealy as "all the wood behind one arrowhead". Even so, Sun kept its hand in the x86 world, as a release of Solaris for PC compatibles began shipping in 1993.
In 1997 Sun acquired Diba, Inc., followed later by the acquisition of Cobalt Networks
in 2000, with the aim of building network appliances (single function computers meant for consumers). Sun also marketed a network computer
(a term popularized and eventually trademarked by Oracle
); the JavaStation
was a diskless system designed to run Java applications.
Although none of these business initiatives were particularly successful, the Cobalt purchase gave Sun a toehold for its return to the x86 hardware market. In 2002, Sun introduced its first general purpose x86 system, the LX50, based in part on previous Cobalt system expertise. This was also Sun's first system announced to support Linux
as well as Solaris.
In 2003, Sun announced a strategic alliance with AMD
to produce x86/x64 servers based on AMD's Opteron
processor; this was followed shortly by Sun's acquisition of Kealia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on high-performance AMD-based servers.
The following year, Sun launched the Opteron-based Sun Fire V20z and V40z servers, and the Java Workstation W1100z and W2100z workstations.
On September 12, 2005, Sun unveiled a new range of Opteron-based servers: the Sun Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200 servers. These were designed from scratch by a team led by Bechtolsheim to address heat and power consumption issues commonly faced in data centers. In July 2006, the Sun Fire X4500
and X4600 systems were introduced, extending a line of x64 systems that support not only Solaris, but also Linux and Microsoft Windows
.
On January 22, 2007, Sun announced a broad strategic alliance with Intel. Intel endorsed Solaris as a mainstream operating system and as its mission critical Unix for its Xeon
processor-based systems, and contributed engineering resources to OpenSolaris
. Sun began using the Intel Xeon processor in its x64 server line, starting with the Sun Blade
X6250 server module introduced in June 2007.
On May 5, 2008, AMD announced its Operating System Research Center (OSRC) expanded its focus to include optimization to Sun's OpenSolaris
and xVM
virtualization products for AMD based processors.
was one of the leading Unix
developers of the time, having contributed the vi
editor, the C shell
, and significant work on the TCP/IP stack to the BSD Unix OS. Sun has since developed software such as the Java programming language and acquired software such as StarOffice
, VirtualBox
and MySQL
.
Sun used community-based and open-source licensing of its major technologies, and for its support of its products with other open source technologies. GNOME
-based desktop software called Java Desktop System
(originally code-named "Madhatter") was first distributed as a Linux implementation then offered as part of the Solaris operating system. Sun supported its Java Enterprise System (a middleware stack) on Linux. It released the source code for Solaris under the open-source Common Development and Distribution License
, via the OpenSolaris
community. Sun's positioning includes a commitment to indemnify users of some software from intellectual property disputes concerning that software. It offers support services on a variety of pricing bases, including per-employee and per-socket.
A 2006 report prepared for the EU by UNU-MERIT
stated that Sun was the largest corporate contributor to open source movements in the world. According to this report, Sun's open source contributions exceed the combined total of the next five largest commercial contributors.
systems, which have a reputation for system stability and a consistent design philosophy.
Sun's first workstation shipped with UniSoft
V7 Unix
. Later in 1982 Sun began providing SunOS
, a customized 4.1BSD
Unix, as the operating system for its workstations.
In the late 1980s, AT&T tapped Sun to help them develop the next release of their branded UNIX, and in 1988 announced they would purchase up to a 20% stake in Sun. UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4) was jointly developed by AT&T and Sun; this partnership triggered concern among Sun's competitors, many of whom banded together to form the Open Software Foundation
(OSF). By the mid-1990s, the ensuing Unix wars
had largely subsided, AT&T had sold off their Unix interests, and the relationship between the two companies was significantly reduced.
Sun used SVR4 as the foundation for Solaris 2, which became the successor to SunOS.
From 1992 Sun also sold INTERACTIVE UNIX
, an operating system it acquired when it bought INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation
from Eastman Kodak Company. This was a popular UNIX variant for the PC platform and a major competitor to market leader SCO UNIX. Sun's focus on INTERACTIVE UNIX diminished in favor of Solaris on both SPARC and x86 systems; it was dropped as a product in 2001.
Sun offered a separate variant of Solaris called Trusted Solaris, which included augmented security features such as multilevel security
and a least privilege access model. Solaris 10 included many of the same capabilities as Trusted Solaris when it was released in 2005; the Solaris November 10, 2006 update included Solaris Trusted Extensions, which give it the remaining capabilities needed to make it the functional successor to Trusted Solaris.
Following several years of difficult competition and loss of server market share to competitors' Linux
-based systems, Sun began to include Linux as part of its strategy in 2002. Sun supported both Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
on its x64 systems; companies such as Canonical Ltd.
, Wind River Systems
and MontaVista
also supported their versions of Linux on Sun's SPARC-based systems.
In 2004, after having cultivated a reputation as one of Microsoft
's most vocal antagonists, Sun entered into a joint relationship with them, resolving various legal entanglements between the two companies and receiving US$1.95 billion in settlement payments from them. Sun supported Microsoft Windows on its x64 systems, and announced other collaborative agreements with Microsoft, including plans to support each others' virtualization environments.
" (WORA). While this objective was not entirely achieved (prompting the riposte "Write once, debug everywhere"), Java is regarded as being largely hardware- and operating system-independent.
Java was initially promoted as a platform for client-side applets
running inside web browsers. Early examples of Java applications were the HotJava
web browser
and the HotJava Views
suite. However, since then Java has been more successful on the server side
of the Internet.
The platform consists of three major parts: the Java programming language, the Java Virtual Machine
(JVM), and several Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The design of the Java platform is controlled by the vendor and user community through the Java Community Process
(JCP).
Java is an object-oriented programming
language. Since its introduction in late 1995, it became one of the world's most popular programming languages.
Java programs are compiled to byte code, which can be executed by any JVM, regardless of the environment.
The Java API
s provide an extensive set of library routines. These APIs evolved into the Standard Edition (Java SE), which provides basic infrastructure and GUI functionality; the Enterprise Edition (Java EE), aimed at large software companies implementing enterprise-class application servers; and the Micro Edition (Java ME), used to build software for devices with limited resources, such as mobile devices.
On November 13, 2006, Sun announced it would be licensing its Java implementation under the GNU General Public License
; it released its Java compiler
and JVM at that time.
In February 2009 Sun entered a battle with Microsoft and Adobe Systems, which promoted rival platforms to build software applications for the Internet. JavaFX
was a development platform for music, video and other applications that builds on the Java programming language.
, which it released as the office suite
OpenOffice.org
under both GNU LGPL and the SISSL (Sun Industry Standards Source License
). OpenOffice.org supported Microsoft Office
file formats (though not perfectly), was available on many platforms (primarily Linux
, Microsoft Windows
, Mac OS X
, and Solaris) and was used in the open source community.
The StarOffice product was a closed-source product based on OpenOffice.org. The principal differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org were that StarOffice was supported by Sun, was available as either a single-user retail box kit or as per-user blocks of licensing for the enterprise, and included a wider range of fonts and document templates and a commercial quality spellchecker. StarOffice also contained commercially licensed functions and add-ons; in OpenOffice.org these were either replaced by open-source or free variants, or are not present at all. Both packages had native support for the OpenDocument
format.
In 2007, Sun announced the Sun xVM
virtualization and datacenter automation product suite for commodity hardware. Sun also acquired VirtualBox
in 2008. Earlier virtualization technologies from Sun like Dynamic System Domains and Dynamic Reconfiguration were specifically designed for high-end SPARC servers, and Logical Domains
only supports the UltraSPARC T1/T2/T2 Plus server platforms. Sun marketed Sun Ops Center provisioning software for datacenter automation.
On the client side, Sun offered virtual desktop
solutions. Desktop environments and applications could be hosted in a datacenter, with users accessing these environments from a wide range of client devices, including Microsoft Windows
PCs, Sun Ray virtual display clients
, Apple Macintoshes, PDAs or any combination of supported devices. A variety of networks were supported, from LAN to WAN or the public Internet. Virtual desktop products included Sun Ray Server Software, Sun Secure Global Desktop
and Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
.
, the developer of the MySQL
database in 2008 for US$ 1 billion. CEO Jonathan Schwartz
mentioned in his blog that optimizing the performance of MySQL was one of the priorities of the acquisition. In February 2008, Sun began to publish results of the MySQL performance optimization work. Sun contributed to the PostgreSQL
project. On the Java platform, Sun contributed to and supported Java DB.
, Waveset Technologies, SeeBeyond, and Vaau. Sun acquired many of the Netscape
non-browser software products as part a deal involving Netscape's merger with AOL
. These software products were initially offered under the iPlanet
brand; once the Sun-Netscape alliance ended, they were re-branded as Sun ONE
(Sun Open Network Environment), and then the Sun Java System
.
Sun's middleware
solution stack
was branded as the Java Enterprise System (or JES), and marketed for web and application serving, communication, calendaring, directory, identity management and service-oriented architecture
. Sun's Open ESB
and other software suites were available free of charge on systems running Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux
, HP-UX
, and Windows
, with support available optionally.
Sun developed data center management software products, which included the Solaris Cluster high availability software, and a grid
management package called Sun Grid Engine
and firewall software such as SunScreen
.
For Network Equipment Provider
s and telecommunications customers, Sun developed the Sun Netra
High-Availability Suite.
Sun produced compilers and development tools under the Sun Studio
brand, for building and developing Solaris and Linux applications.
Sun entered the Software as a Service
(SaaS) market with zembly
, a social cloud-based computing platform and Project Kenai
, an open-source project hosting service.
On June 2, 2005, Sun announced it would purchase Storage Technology Corporation
(StorageTek) for US$4.1 billion in cash, or $37.00 per share, a deal completed in August 2005.
In 2006, Sun introduced the Sun StorageTek 5800 System, the first application-aware programmable storage solution. In 2008, Sun contributed the source code of the StorageTek 5800 System under the BSD license.
Sun announced the Sun Open Storage
platform in 2008 built with open source technologies.
In late 2008 Sun announced the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems (codenamed Amber Road). Transparent placement of data in the systems' solid-state drive
s (SSD) and conventional hard drives was managed by ZFS
to take advantage of the speed of SSDs and the economy of conventional hard disks.
Other storage products included Sun Fire X4500
storage server and SAM-QFS
filesystem and storage management software.
for High-Performance Computing
(HPC). Even before the introduction of the Sun Constellation System in 2007, Sun's products were in use in many of the TOP500
systems and supercomputing centers:
The Sun HPC ClusterTools product was a set of Message Passing Interface
(MPI) libraries and tools for running parallel jobs on Solaris HPC clusters. Beginning with version 7.0, Sun switched from its own implementation of MPI to Open MPI
, and donated engineering resources to the Open MPI project.
Sun was a participant in the OpenMP
language committee. Sun Studio
compilers and tools implemented the OpenMP specification for shared memory parallelization.
In 2006, Sun built the TSUBAME supercomputer, which was until June 2008 the fastest supercomputer in Asia. Sun built Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center
(TACC) in 2007. Ranger had a peak performance of over 500 TFLOPS, and was the 6th most powerful supercomputer on the TOP500
list in November 2008.
Sun announced an OpenSolaris
distribution that integrated many of Sun's HPC products and other 3rd-party solutions.
, Radia Perlman
, Marc Tremblay
, and Ned Freed
. Sun was an early advocate of Unix
-based networked computing, promoting TCP/IP and especially NFS, as reflected in the company's motto "The Network Is The Computer", coined by John Gage
. James Gosling
led the team which developed the Java programming language
. Jon Bosak
led the creation of the XML
specification at W3C.
Sun staff published articles on the company's blog site. Staff were encouraged to use the site to blog on any aspect of their work or personal life, with few restrictions placed on staff, other than commercially confidential material. Jonathan I. Schwartz
was one of the first CEOs of large companies to regularly blog; his postings were frequently quoted and analyzed in the press.
in 2009.
Sun's staff were asked to share anecdotes about their experiences at Sun. A web site containing videos, stories, and photographs from 27 years at Sun was made available on September 2, 2009.
In October, Sun announced a second round of thousands of employees to be laid off, blamed partially on delays in approval of the merger.
The transaction completed in early 2010.
In January 2011 Oracle agreed to pay $46 million to settle charges that it submitted false claims to US federal government agencies and paid "kickbacks" to systems integrators.
In February 2011 Sun's former Menlo Park, California
campus of about 1000000 ft2 was sold, and it was announced that it would become headquarters for Facebook
.
The sprawling facility built around an enclosed courtyard had been nicknamed "Sun Quentin".
On September 1st 2011, Sun India legally became part of Oracle. It had been delayed due to legal issues in Indian court.
Santa Clara, California
Santa Clara , founded in 1777 and incorporated in 1852, is a city in Santa Clara County, in the U.S. state of California. The city is the site of the eighth of 21 California missions, Mission Santa Clara de Asís, and was named after the mission. The Mission and Mission Gardens are located on the...
(part of Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...
), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center
Agnews Developmental Center
Agnews Developmental Center is a psychiatric and medical care facility, now located in San Jose, California.In 1885, the center, originally known as "The Great Asylum for the Insane", was established as a facility for the care of the mentally ill...
.
On January 27, 2010, Sun was acquired
Sun acquisition by Oracle
The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation was completed by Oracle on January 27, 2010. Significantly, Oracle, previously only a software vendor, now owned both hardware and software product lines from Sun The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation was completed by...
by Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
for US$7.4 billion, based on an agreement signed on April 20, 2009. The following month, Sun Microsystems, Inc. was merged with Oracle USA, Inc. to become Oracle America, Inc.
Sun products included computer server
Server (computing)
In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
s and workstation
Workstation
A workstation is a high-end microcomputer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems...
s based on its own SPARC
SPARC
SPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....
processor
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
s as well as AMD
Advanced Micro Devices
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. or AMD is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for commercial and consumer markets...
's Opteron
Opteron
Opteron is AMD's x86 server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture . It was released on April 22, 2003 with the SledgeHammer core and was intended to compete in the server and workstation markets, particularly in the same...
and Intel's Xeon
Xeon
The Xeon is a brand of multiprocessing- or multi-socket-capable x86 microprocessors from Intel Corporation targeted at the non-consumer server, workstation and embedded system markets.-Overview:...
processors; storage
Computer storage
Computer data storage, often called storage or memory, refers to computer components and recording media that retain digital data. Data storage is one of the core functions and fundamental components of computers....
systems; and, a suite of software products including the Solaris operating system, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management
Identity management
Identity management is a broad administrative area that deals with identifying individuals in a system and controlling access to the resources in that system by placing restrictions on the established identities of the individuals.Identity management is multidisciplinary and covers many...
applications. Other technologies included the Java platform, MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
, and NFS.
Sun was a proponent of open systems in general and Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
in particular, and a major contributor to open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
software. Sun's main manufacturing facilities were located in Hillsboro, Oregon
Hillsboro, Oregon
Hillsboro is the fifth-largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon and is the county seat of Washington County. Lying in the Tualatin Valley on the west side of the Portland metropolitan area, the city is home to many high-technology companies, such as Intel, that compose what has become known as the...
and Linlithgow
Linlithgow
Linlithgow is a Royal Burgh in West Lothian, Scotland. An ancient town, it lies south of its two most prominent landmarks: Linlithgow Palace and Linlithgow Loch, and north of the Union Canal....
, Scotland.
History
| Sun Microsystems logo history | |
|---|---|
| Logo | Years |
| |
Original Sun Microsystems logo, as used on the nameplate of the Sun-1 Sun-1 Sun-1 was the first generation of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in May 1982. These were based on a CPU board designed by Andy Bechtolsheim while he was a graduate student at Stanford University and funded by DARPA... workstation |
| |
Revised logo, used until early 1990s |
 |
From the 1990s until acquisition by Oracle Corporation |
The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation, the Sun-1
Sun-1
Sun-1 was the first generation of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in May 1982. These were based on a CPU board designed by Andy Bechtolsheim while he was a graduate student at Stanford University and funded by DARPA...
, was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim
Andy Bechtolsheim
Andreas von Bechtolsheim is an electrical engineer who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer....
when he was a graduate student at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
in Palo Alto, California. He originally designed the SUN workstation
SUN workstation
The original SUN workstation was a modular computer system designed at Stanford University in the early 1980s.-History:The project name was derived from Stanford University Network, the campus network within Stanford....
for the Stanford University Network
Stanford University Network
The Stanford University Network, also known as SUN, SUNet or SU-Net is the campus computer network for Stanford University.-History:Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes...
communications project as a personal CAD workstation
Workstation
A workstation is a high-end microcomputer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems...
. It was designed around the Motorola 68000
Motorola 68000
The Motorola 68000 is a 16/32-bit CISC microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor...
processor with an advanced Memory management unit
Memory management unit
A memory management unit , sometimes called paged memory management unit , is a computer hardware component responsible for handling accesses to memory requested by the CPU...
(MMU) to support the Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science
Stanford University School of Engineering
Stanford University School of Engineering is one of the schools of Stanford University. The school has had eight deans; the current is James D. Plummer.-Previous Deans:# Theodore J. Hoover 1925-1936# Samuel B. Morris 1936-1944...
and Silicon Valley supply houses.
On February 24, 1982, Vinod Khosla
Vinod Khosla
Vinod Khosla is an Indian-born American venture capitalist and an influential personality in Silicon Valley....
, Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy
Scott McNealy
Scott McNealy is an American business executive. He co-founded computer technology company Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Andy Bechtolsheim.-Biography:...
, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy
Bill Joy
William Nelson Joy , commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003...
of Berkeley, a primary developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution
Berkeley Software Distribution
Berkeley Software Distribution is a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995...
(BSD), joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders.
The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network
Stanford University Network
The Stanford University Network, also known as SUN, SUNet or SU-Net is the campus computer network for Stanford University.-History:Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes...
. Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982.
Sun's initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol SUNW, for Sun Workstations (later Sun Worldwide). The symbol was changed in 2007 to JAVA; Sun stated that the brand awareness
Brand awareness
Brand awareness is a marketing concept that enables marketers to quantify levels and trends in consumer knowledge and awareness of a brand's existence...
associated with its Java platform better represented the company's current strategy.
Sun's logo, which features four interleaved copies
Ambigram
An ambigram is a typographical design or art form that may be read as one or more words not only in its form as presented, but also from another viewpoint, direction, or orientation. The words readable in the other viewpoint, direction or orientation may be the same or different from the original...
of the word sun, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt, also of Stanford. The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently redesigned so as to appear to stand on one corner and the color changed to purple.
The "Bubble" and its aftermath
In the dot-com bubbleDot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...
, Sun began making much more money, and its shares rose dramatically. It also began spending much more, hiring workers and building itself out. Some of this was because of genuine demand, but much was from web start-up companies anticipating business that would never happen. In 2000, the bubble burst.
Sales in Sun's important hardware division went into free-fall as customers closed shop and auctioned off high-end servers.
Several quarters of steep losses led to executive departures, rounds of layoffs, and other cost cutting. In December 2001, the stock fell to the 1998, pre-bubble level of about $100. But it kept falling, faster than many other tech companies. A year later it had dipped below $10 (a tenth of what it was even in 1990) but bounced back to $20. In mid-2004, Sun closed their Newark, California
Newark, California
Newark is a city in Alameda County, California, United States. It was incorporated as a city in September 1955. Newark is an enclave, completely surrounded by the city of Fremont. Its population was 42,573 at the 2010 census.-Geography:...
, factory and consolidated all manufacturing to Hillsboro, Oregon
Hillsboro, Oregon
Hillsboro is the fifth-largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon and is the county seat of Washington County. Lying in the Tualatin Valley on the west side of the Portland metropolitan area, the city is home to many high-technology companies, such as Intel, that compose what has become known as the...
.
That factory later closed, in 2006.
Post-crash focus
Instruction level parallelism
Instruction-level parallelism is a measure of how many of the operations in a computer program can be performed simultaneously. Consider the following program: 1. e = a + b 2. f = c + d 3. g = e * f...
and operating frequency. Instead, the company chose to concentrate on processors optimized for multi-threading and multiprocessing
Multiprocessing
Multiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor and/or the ability to allocate tasks between them...
, such as the UltraSPARC T1
UltraSPARC T1
|right|262px|UltraSPARC T1 processorSun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T1 microprocessor, known until its 14 November 2005 announcement by its development codename "Niagara", is a multithreading, multicore CPU...
processor (codenamed "Niagara"). The company also announced a collaboration with Fujitsu
Fujitsu
is a Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is the world's third-largest IT services provider measured by revenues....
to use the Japanese company's processor chips in mid-range and high-end Sun servers. These servers were announced on April 17, 2007 as the M-Series, part of the SPARC Enterprise
SPARC Enterprise
The SPARC Enterprise series is a range of UNIX server computers co-developed by Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu introduced in 2007. They are marketed and sold by Sun Microsystems , Fujitsu, and Fujitsu Siemens Computers under the common brand of SPARC Enterprise, superseding Sun's Sun Fire and...
series.
In February 2005, Sun announced the Sun Grid
Sun Grid
Sun Cloud is an on-demand Cloud computing service operated by Sun Microsystems, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation. The Sun Cloud Compute Utility provides access to a substantial computing resource over the Internet for US$1 per CPU-hour...
, a grid computing
Grid computing
Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files...
deployment on which it offers utility computing
Utility computing
Utility computing is the packaging of computing resources, such as computation, storage and services, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility...
services priced at US$1 per CPU/hour for processing and per GB/month for storage. This offering builds upon an existing 3,000-CPU server farm used for internal R&D for over 10 years, which Sun markets as being able to achieve 97% utilization. In August 2005, the first commercial use of this grid was announced for financial risk simulations which was later launched as its first Software as a Service
Software as a Service
Software as a service , sometimes referred to as "on-demand software," is a software delivery model in which software and its associated data are hosted centrally and are typically accessed by users using a thin client, normally using a web browser over the Internet.SaaS has become a common...
product.
In January 2005, Sun reported a net profit of $19 million for fiscal 2005 second quarter, for the first time in three years. This was followed by net loss of $9 million on GAAP
Gaap
In demonology, Gaap is a mighty Prince and Great President of Hell, commanding sixty-six legions of demons. He is, according to The Lesser Key of Solomon, the king and prince of the southern region of Hell and Earth, and according to the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum the king of the western region and...
basis for the third quarter 2005, as reported on April 14, 2005. In January 2007, Sun reported a net GAAP profit of $126 million on revenue of $3.337 billion for its fiscal second quarter. Shortly following that news, it was announced that Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) would invest $700 million in the company.
Sun had engineering groups in Bangalore
Bangalore
Bengaluru , formerly called Bengaluru is the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. Bangalore is nicknamed the Garden City and was once called a pensioner's paradise. Located on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern part of Karnataka, Bangalore is India's third most populous city and...
, Beijing, Dublin, Grenoble
Grenoble
Grenoble is a city in southeastern France, at the foot of the French Alps where the river Drac joins the Isère. Located in the Rhône-Alpes region, Grenoble is the capital of the department of Isère...
, Hamburg, Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv , officially Tel Aviv-Yafo , is the second most populous city in Israel, with a population of 404,400 on a land area of . The city is located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline in west-central Israel. It is the largest and most populous city in the metropolitan area of Gush Dan, with...
, Tokyo, and Trondheim
Trondheim
Trondheim , historically, Nidaros and Trondhjem, is a city and municipality in Sør-Trøndelag county, Norway. With a population of 173,486, it is the third most populous municipality and city in the country, although the fourth largest metropolitan area. It is the administrative centre of...
.
In 2007–2008, Sun posted revenue of $13.8 billion and had $2 billion in cash. First-quarter 2008 losses were $1.68 billion; revenue fell 7% to $12.99 billion. Sun's stock lost 80% of its value November 2007 to November 2008, reducing the company's market value to $3 billion. With falling sales to large corporate clients, Sun announced plans to lay off 5,000 to 6,000 workers, or 15–18% of its work force. It expected to save $700 million to $800 million a year as a result of the moves, while also taking up to $600 million in charges.
Sun acquisitions
- 1987 – Trancept Systems, a high performance graphics hardware company
- 1987 – Centram Systems West, maker of networking software for PCs, Macs and Sun systems
- 1988 – Folio, Inc., developer of intelligent font scaling technology and the F3F3 (font format)F3 is an outline font format created by Folio, Inc. Sun Microsystems acquired Folio in 1988, and included 57 F3 fonts and the F3 interpreter, TypeScaler, in its OpenWindows desktop environment. The font format allowed for hinting. The extension of F3 Font Format outlines is .f3b....
font format - 1991 – INTERACTIVE Systems CorporationINTERACTIVE Systems CorporationINTERACTIVE Systems Corporation was a US-based software company and the first vendor of the Unix operating system outside AT&T, operating from Santa Monica, CA....
's Intel/Unix OS division, from Eastman Kodak Company - 1992 – Praxsys Technologies, Inc., developers of the Windows emulation technology that eventually became Wabi
- 1994 – Thinking Machines Corporation hardware division
- 1996 – Lighthouse DesignLighthouse DesignLighthouse Design Ltd. was an American software company that operated from 1989 to 1996. Lighthouse developed software for NeXT computers running the NeXTSTEP operating system. The company was founded in 1989 by Alan Chung, Roger Rosner, Jonathan Schwartz, Kevin Steele and Brian Skinner, in...
, Ltd. - 1996 – Cray Business Systems Division, from Silicon GraphicsSilicon GraphicsSilicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
- 1996 – Integrated Micro Products, specializing in fault tolerant servers
- 1996 – Thinking Machines Corporation software division
- February 1997 – LongView Technologies, LLC
- August 1997 – Diba, technology supplier for the Information Appliance industry
- September 1997 – Chorus Systems, creators of ChorusOSChorusOSChorusOS is a microkernel real-time operating system designed for embedded systems. Sun Microsystems acquired Chorus Systèmes, the company which created ChorusOS, in 1997. Sun no longer supports ChorusOS. The founders of Chorus Systems started a new company called Jaluna in August 2002. Jaluna has...
- November 1997 – Encore ComputerEncore ComputerEncore Computer was an early pioneer in the parallel computing market, based in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Although offering a number of system designs beginning in 1985, they were never as well known as other companies in this field such as Pyramid Technology, Alliant, and the most similar...
Corporation's storage business - 1998 – RedCape Software
- 1998 - i-Planet, a small software company that produced the "Pony Espresso" mobile email client—its name (sans hyphen) for the Sun-Netscape software allianceIPlanetiPlanet was a product brand that was used jointly by Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications Corporation when delivering software and services as part of a non-exclusive cross marketing deal that was also known as "A Sun|Netscape Alliance"....
- July 1998 – NetDynamics – developers of the NetDynamics Application ServerNetDynamics Application ServerNetDynamics Application Server was the first Java-based integrated software platform. The product was developed by NetDynamics Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up company founded in 1995 by Zack Rinat and Ofer Ben-Shachar...
- October 1998 – Beduin, small software company that produced the "Impact" small-footprint Java-based Web browser for mobile devices.
- 1999 – StarDivision, German software company and with it StarOfficeStarOfficeStarOffice, known briefly as Oracle Open Office before its discontinuation in 2010, is a proprietary office suite. It was originally developed by StarDivision which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999...
, which was later released as open sourceOpen sourceThe term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
under the name OpenOffice.orgOpenOffice.orgOpenOffice.org, commonly known as OOo or OpenOffice, is an open-source application suite whose main components are for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. OpenOffice is available for a number of different computer operating systems, is distributed as free software... - 1999 – MAXSTRAT Corporation, a company in Milpitas, CaliforniaMilpitas, CaliforniaMilpitas is a city in Santa Clara County, California. It is a suburb of the major city of San Jose, California. It is located with San Jose to its south and Fremont to its north, at the eastern end of State Route 237 and generally between Interstates 680 and 880 which run roughly north/south...
selling Fibre ChannelFibre ChannelFibre Channel, or FC, is a gigabit-speed network technology primarily used for storage networking. Fibre Channel is standardized in the T11 Technical Committee of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards , an American National Standards Institute –accredited standards...
storage servers. - 1999 – Forte, an enterprise software company specializing in integration solutions and developer of the Forte 4GLForte 4GLForté 4GL is a proprietary application server used for developing scalable, highly-available, enterprise applications.- History :Forté 4GL was created as an integrated solution for developing and managing client/server applications...
and TeamWareTeamWareSun WorkShop TeamWare is a distributed source code revision control system made by Sun Microsystems... - 1999 – NetBeansNetBeansNetBeans refers to both a platform framework for Java desktop applications, and an integrated development environment for developing with Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Groovy, C, C++, Scala, Clojure, and others...
, produced a modular IDE written in Java, based on a student project at Charles University in Prague - March 2000 – Innosoft International, Inc. a software company specializing in highly scalable MTAs (PMDF) and Directory Services.
- July 2000 – Gridware, a software company whose products managed the distribution of computing jobs across multiple computers
- September 2000 – Cobalt NetworksCobalt NetworksCobalt Networks was a maker of low-cost Linux-based servers. Founded in 1996 in Mountain View, California under the name Cobalt Microserver, the company pioneered easy-to-use server appliances featuring secure web user interfaces, designed for Internet service providers and small to medium sized...
, an Internet appliance manufacturer - December 2000 – HighGround, with a suite of Web-based management solutions
- 2001 – LSC, Inc., an Eagan, Minnesota company that developed Storage and Archive Management File System(SAM-FS) and Quick File System QFSQFSQFS is an open source filesystem from Sun Microsystems. It is tightly integrated with SAM, the Storage and Archive Manager, and hence is often referred to as SAM-QFS. SAM provides the functionality of a Hierarchical Storage Manager....
file systems for backup and archive - March 2002 – Clustra Systems
- June 2002 – Afara WebsystemsAfara WebsystemsAfara Websystems Inc. was a Sunnyvale, California, USA server company whose goal was to build servers surrounding a custom high-throughput CPU architecture, "developing IP traffic management systems that will bring quality-of-service to the next generation of IP access infrastructure." The word...
, developed SPARC processor-based technology - September 2002 – Pirus Networks, intelligent storage services
- November 2002 – Terraspring, infrastructure automation software
- June 2003 – PixoPixoPixo was a company that developed infrastructure for hand-held devices. It was founded in 1994 when Paul Mercer, a software developer at Apple, left to form his own company. The company developed a system software toolkit in C++ for use on cell phones and other hand-held devices...
, added to the Sun Content Delivery Server - August 2003 – CenterRun, Inc.
- December 2003 – Waveset Technologies, identity management
- January 2004 – Nauticus Networks
- February 2004 – Kealia, founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, developed AMD-based 64-bit servers
- January 2005 – SevenSpace, a multi-platform managed services provider
- May 2005 – Tarantella, Inc.Tarantella, Inc.Santa Cruz Operation was a software company based in Santa Cruz, California which was best known for selling three Unix variants for Intel x86 processors: Xenix, SCO UNIX , and UnixWare. Eric Raymond, in his book The Art of Unix Programming, calls SCO the "first Unix company"...
(formerly known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO)), for $25,000,000 - June 2005 – SeeBeyond, a Service-Oriented ArchitectureService-oriented architectureIn software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...
(SOA) software company for $387m - June 2005 – Procom Technology, Inc.'s NAS IP Assets
- August 2005 – StorageTek
- February 2006 – Aduva, software for Solaris and Linux patch management
- October 2006 – Neogent
- April 2007 – SavaJeSavaJeSavaJe was the developer of the SavaJe OS, a Java OS for advanced mobile phones.The SavaJe OS was a monolithic OS-and-Java platform, an implementation of Sun Microsystems' Java Standard Edition, as opposed to...
, the SavaJe OS, a Java OS for mobile phones - September 2007 – Cluster File SystemsCluster File SystemsCluster File Systems, Inc. is the company that originally developed the Lustre distributed file system. CFS was a privately held company with offices in the United States, and China.CFS was founded in 2001 by Dr. Peter Braam...
, Inc. - November 2007 – Vaau, Enterprise Role Management and identity compliance solutions
- February 2008 – MySQL ABMySQL ABMySQL AB was a software company. MySQL AB is the creator of MySQL, a relational database management system, as well as related products such as MySQL Cluster...
, the company offering the open source database MySQLMySQLMySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My... - February 2008 – Innotek GmbH, developer of the VirtualBoxVirtualBoxOracle VM VirtualBox is an x86 virtualization software package, originally created by software company Innotek GmbH, purchased by Sun Microsystems, and now developed by Oracle Corporation as part of its family of virtualization products...
virtualization product
- April 2008 – Montalvo SystemsMontalvo SystemsMontalvo Systems was a Silicon Valley start-up reportedly working on an asymmetrical, x86 capable processor similar to the Cell microprocessor. The processor was to use high-performance cores for performance-intensive threads, and delegate minor tasks to the simpler cores to save silicon and power...
, x86 microprocessor startup acquired before first silicon - January 2009 – Q-layer, a software company with cloud computing solutions
Major stockholders
As of May 11, 2009, the following shareholders held over 100,000 common shares of Sun: and at $9.40 per share offered by Oracle they received the amounts indicated when the acquisition closed.| Investor | Common Shares | Value at Merger |
|---|---|---|
| Barclays Global Investors | 37,606,402 | $353,500,180 |
| Scott G. McNealy | 14,566,433 | $136,924,470 |
| M. Kenneth Oshman | 584,985 | $5,498,860 |
| Jonathan I. Schwartz Jonathan I. Schwartz Jonathan Ian Schwartz is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Picture of Health. He was formerly the President and CEO of Sun Microsystems prior to its acquisition by Oracle, and previously the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lighthouse Design, Ltd., a software company focused on... |
536,109 | $5,039,425 |
| James L. Barksdale Jim Barksdale Jim Barksdale was the president and CEO of Netscape Communications Corporation from January 1995 until the company merged with AOL in March 1999.-Early life:... |
231,785 | $2,178,780 |
| Michael E. Lehman | 106,684 | $1,002,830 |
Hardware
For the first decade of Sun's history, the company positioned its products as technical workstations, competing successfully as a low-cost vendor during the Workstation Wars of the 1980s. It then shifted its hardware product line to emphasize servers and storage.High-level telecom control systems such as Operational Support Systems service predominantly used Sun equipment. This use is due mainly to the company basing its products around a mature and very stable version of the Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
operating system and the support service that Sun provides.
Motorola-based systems
Sun originally used Motorola 68000 family Central processing unitCentral processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
s for the Sun-1
Sun-1
Sun-1 was the first generation of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in May 1982. These were based on a CPU board designed by Andy Bechtolsheim while he was a graduate student at Stanford University and funded by DARPA...
through Sun-3
Sun-3
Sun-3 was the name given to a series of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched on September 9th, 1985. The Sun-3 series were VMEbus-based systems similar to some of the earlier Sun-2 series, but using the Motorola 68020 microprocessor, in combination with the...
computer series. The Sun-1 employed a 68000
Motorola 68000
The Motorola 68000 is a 16/32-bit CISC microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor...
CPU, the Sun-2
Sun-2
The Sun-2 series of UNIX workstations and servers was launched by Sun Microsystems in November 1983. As the name suggests, the Sun-2 represented the second generation of Sun systems, superseding the original Sun-1 series...
series, a 68010
Motorola 68010
The Motorola MC68010 processor is a 16/32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1982. In line with the Motorola 68000 naming convention, it is usually just referred to as the 010 ....
. The Sun-3
Sun-3
Sun-3 was the name given to a series of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched on September 9th, 1985. The Sun-3 series were VMEbus-based systems similar to some of the earlier Sun-2 series, but using the Motorola 68020 microprocessor, in combination with the...
series was based on the 68020
Motorola 68020
The Motorola 68020 is a 32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1984. It is the successor to the Motorola 68010 and is succeeded by the Motorola 68030...
, with the later Sun-3x variant using the 68030
Motorola 68030
The Motorola 68030 is a 32-bit microprocessor in Motorola's 68000 family. It was released in 1987. The 68030 was the successor to the Motorola 68020, and was followed by the Motorola 68040. In keeping with general Motorola naming, this CPU is often referred to as the 030 .The 68030 features on-chip...
.
SPARC-based systems
Sun-4
Sun-4 is a series of Unix workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in 1987. The original Sun-4 series were VMEbus-based systems similar to the earlier Sun-3 series, but employing microprocessors based on Sun's own SPARC V7 RISC architecture in place of the 68k family...
line. SPARC was initially a 32-bit
32-bit
The range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4,294,967,295. Hence, a processor with 32-bit memory addresses can directly access 4 GB of byte-addressable memory....
architecture until the introduction of the SPARC V9 architecture in 1995, which added 64-bit
64-bit
64-bit is a word size that defines certain classes of computer architecture, buses, memory and CPUs, and by extension the software that runs on them. 64-bit CPUs have existed in supercomputers since the 1970s and in RISC-based workstations and servers since the early 1990s...
extensions.
Sun has developed several generations of SPARC-based computer systems, including the SPARCstation
SPARCstation
The SPARCstation, SPARCserver and SPARCcenter product lines were a series of SPARC-based computer workstations and servers in desktop, deskside and rack-based form factor developed and sold by Sun Microsystems...
, Ultra
Sun Ultra series
The original Sun Ultra series was a series of UltraSPARC-based workstations and servers developed and sold by Sun Microsystems from 1995 to 2001...
and Sun Blade series of workstations, and the SPARCserver, Netra
Sun Netra
The Sun Netra brand has been used for a variety of server computers from Sun Microsystems since 1994. The original Netra servers were re-badged SPARCstation and Sun Ultra series systems bundled with server application software.Later the Netra name was mainly used for a series of ruggedized ...
, Enterprise
Sun Enterprise
Sun Enterprise is a range of UNIX server computers produced by Sun Microsystems from 1996 to 2001. The line was launched as the Sun Ultra Enterprise series; the Ultra prefix was dropped around 1998. These systems were based on the 64-bit UltraSPARC microprocessor architecture and related to the...
and Sun Fire
Sun Fire
The Sun Fire server brand is a series of server computers introduced in 2001 by Sun Microsystems . The Sun Fire branding coincided with the introduction of the UltraSPARC III processor, superseding the UltraSPARC II-based Sun Enterprise series...
line of servers.
In the early 1990s the company began to extend its product line to include large-scale symmetric multiprocessing
Symmetric multiprocessing
In computing, symmetric multiprocessing involves a multiprocessor computer hardware architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single shared main memory and are controlled by a single OS instance. Most common multiprocessor systems today use an SMP architecture...
servers, starting with the four-processor SPARCserver 600MP. This was followed by the 8-processor SPARCserver 1000 and 20-processor SPARCcenter 2000, which were based on work done in conjunction with Xerox PARC
Xerox PARC
PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....
. In the late 1990s this transformation was accelerated by the acquisition of Cray Business Systems Division from Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
. Their 32-bit, 64-processor Cray Superserver 6400
Cray CS6400
The Cray Superserver 6400, or CS6400, was a multiprocessor server computer system produced by Cray Research Superservers, Inc., a subsidiary of Cray Research, and launched in 1993...
, related to the SPARCcenter, led to the 64-bit Sun Enterprise 10000 high-end server (otherwise known as Starfire). In 2006, Sun has also ventured into the blade server
Blade server
A blade server is a stripped down server computer with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. Whereas a standard rack-mount server can function with a power cord and network cable, blade servers have many components removed to save space, minimize power...
(high density rack-mounted systems) market with the Sun Blade
Sun Blade
The Sun Blade series was a computer workstation line developed and sold by Sun Microsystems from 2000 to 2006. The Sun Blade architecture was based on the UltraSPARC microprocessor family. The range replaced the earlier Sun Ultra workstation series....
(distinct from the Sun Blade workstation).
In November 2005 Sun launched the UltraSPARC T1
UltraSPARC T1
|right|262px|UltraSPARC T1 processorSun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T1 microprocessor, known until its 14 November 2005 announcement by its development codename "Niagara", is a multithreading, multicore CPU...
, notable for its ability to concurrently run 32 threads of execution on 8 processor cores. Its intent was to drive more efficient use of CPU resources, which is of particular importance in data center
Data center
A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems...
s, where there is an increasing need to reduce power and air conditioning demands, much of which comes from the heat generated by CPUs. The T1 was followed by the UltraSPARC T2
UltraSPARC T2
Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T2 microprocessor is a multithreading, multi-core CPU. It is a member of the SPARC family, and the successor to the UltraSPARC T1. The chip is sometimes referred to by its codename, Niagara 2...
, which extended the number of threads per core from 4 to 8, and T2 Plus, which added the ability to have multiple T2 processors in one system. Sun has open sourced the design specifications of both the T1 and T2 processors via the OpenSPARC
OpenSPARC
OpenSPARC is an open-source hardware project started in December 2005. The initial contribution to the project was Sun Microsystems' register-transfer level Verilog code for a full 64-bit, 32-thread microprocessor, the UltraSPARC T1 processor. On 21 March 2006, Sun released the source code to the...
project.
In April 2007, Sun released the SPARC Enterprise
SPARC Enterprise
The SPARC Enterprise series is a range of UNIX server computers co-developed by Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu introduced in 2007. They are marketed and sold by Sun Microsystems , Fujitsu, and Fujitsu Siemens Computers under the common brand of SPARC Enterprise, superseding Sun's Sun Fire and...
server products, jointly designed by Sun and Fujitsu
Fujitsu
is a Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is the world's third-largest IT services provider measured by revenues....
and based on Fujitsu SPARC64 VI
SPARC64 VI
The SPARC64 VI, code-named Olympus-C, is a microprocessor, developed by Fujitsu. It implements the SPARC V9 instruction set architecture and is compliant with the Joint Programming Specification developed by Fujitsu and Sun. It is used by Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems in their SPARC Enterprise...
and later processors. The M-class SPARC Enterprise systems include high-end reliability and availability features.
x86-based systems
In the late 1980s, Sun also marketed an Intel 80386Intel 80386
The Intel 80386, also known as the i386, or just 386, was a 32-bit microprocessor introduced by Intel in 1985. The first versions had 275,000 transistors and were used as the central processing unit of many workstations and high-end personal computers of the time...
-based machine, the Sun386i
Sun386i
The Sun386i was a hybrid UNIX workstation/PC compatible computer system produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in 1988. It was based on the Intel 80386 microprocessor but shared many features with the contemporary Sun-3 series systems....
; this was designed to be a hybrid system, running SunOS but at the same time supporting DOS applications. This only remained on the market for a brief time. A follow-up "486i" upgrade was announced but only a few prototype units were ever manufactured.
Sun's brief first foray into x86 systems ended in the early 1990s, as it decided to concentrate on SPARC and retire the last Motorola systems and 386i products, a move dubbed by McNealy as "all the wood behind one arrowhead". Even so, Sun kept its hand in the x86 world, as a release of Solaris for PC compatibles began shipping in 1993.
In 1997 Sun acquired Diba, Inc., followed later by the acquisition of Cobalt Networks
Cobalt Networks
Cobalt Networks was a maker of low-cost Linux-based servers. Founded in 1996 in Mountain View, California under the name Cobalt Microserver, the company pioneered easy-to-use server appliances featuring secure web user interfaces, designed for Internet service providers and small to medium sized...
in 2000, with the aim of building network appliances (single function computers meant for consumers). Sun also marketed a network computer
Network computer
Network Computer is a trademark of Oracle Corporation that was used, from approximately 1996 to 2000, to market a range of diskless desktop computer devices. The devices were designed and manufactured by an alliance, which included Sun Microsystems, IBM, and others...
(a term popularized and eventually trademarked by Oracle
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
); the JavaStation
JavaStation
The JavaStation was a Network Computer developed by Sun Microsystems between 1996 and 2000, intended to run only Java applications.The hardware is based on the design of the Sun SPARCstation series, a very successful line of UNIX workstations....
was a diskless system designed to run Java applications.
Although none of these business initiatives were particularly successful, the Cobalt purchase gave Sun a toehold for its return to the x86 hardware market. In 2002, Sun introduced its first general purpose x86 system, the LX50, based in part on previous Cobalt system expertise. This was also Sun's first system announced to support Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
as well as Solaris.
In 2003, Sun announced a strategic alliance with AMD
Advanced Micro Devices
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. or AMD is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for commercial and consumer markets...
to produce x86/x64 servers based on AMD's Opteron
Opteron
Opteron is AMD's x86 server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture . It was released on April 22, 2003 with the SledgeHammer core and was intended to compete in the server and workstation markets, particularly in the same...
processor; this was followed shortly by Sun's acquisition of Kealia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on high-performance AMD-based servers.
The following year, Sun launched the Opteron-based Sun Fire V20z and V40z servers, and the Java Workstation W1100z and W2100z workstations.
On September 12, 2005, Sun unveiled a new range of Opteron-based servers: the Sun Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200 servers. These were designed from scratch by a team led by Bechtolsheim to address heat and power consumption issues commonly faced in data centers. In July 2006, the Sun Fire X4500
Sun Fire X4500
The Sun Fire X4500 data server integrates server and storage technologies. It was announced in July, 2006 and is part of the Sun Fire server line from Sun Microsystems....
and X4600 systems were introduced, extending a line of x64 systems that support not only Solaris, but also Linux and Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
.
On January 22, 2007, Sun announced a broad strategic alliance with Intel. Intel endorsed Solaris as a mainstream operating system and as its mission critical Unix for its Xeon
Xeon
The Xeon is a brand of multiprocessing- or multi-socket-capable x86 microprocessors from Intel Corporation targeted at the non-consumer server, workstation and embedded system markets.-Overview:...
processor-based systems, and contributed engineering resources to OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris was an open source computer operating system based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems. It was also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the software...
. Sun began using the Intel Xeon processor in its x64 server line, starting with the Sun Blade
Sun Blade
The Sun Blade series was a computer workstation line developed and sold by Sun Microsystems from 2000 to 2006. The Sun Blade architecture was based on the UltraSPARC microprocessor family. The range replaced the earlier Sun Ultra workstation series....
X6250 server module introduced in June 2007.
On May 5, 2008, AMD announced its Operating System Research Center (OSRC) expanded its focus to include optimization to Sun's OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris was an open source computer operating system based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems. It was also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the software...
and xVM
Sun xVM
Sun xVM is a product group from Sun Microsystems that addresses virtualization technology on x86 platforms.-History:Sun originally announced the xVM product family in October 2007 as a broader product line...
virtualization products for AMD based processors.
Software
Although Sun was initially known as a hardware company, its software history began with its founding in 1982; co-founder Bill JoyBill Joy
William Nelson Joy , commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003...
was one of the leading Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
developers of the time, having contributed the vi
Vi
vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system. The portable subset of the behavior of vi and programs based on it, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by the Single Unix Specification and POSIX.The original code for vi...
editor, the C shell
C shell
The C shell is a Unix shell that was created by Bill Joy while a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s. It has been distributed widely, beginning with the 2BSD release of the BSD Unix system that Joy began distributing in 1978...
, and significant work on the TCP/IP stack to the BSD Unix OS. Sun has since developed software such as the Java programming language and acquired software such as StarOffice
StarOffice
StarOffice, known briefly as Oracle Open Office before its discontinuation in 2010, is a proprietary office suite. It was originally developed by StarDivision which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999...
, VirtualBox
VirtualBox
Oracle VM VirtualBox is an x86 virtualization software package, originally created by software company Innotek GmbH, purchased by Sun Microsystems, and now developed by Oracle Corporation as part of its family of virtualization products...
and MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
.
Sun used community-based and open-source licensing of its major technologies, and for its support of its products with other open source technologies. GNOME
GNOME
GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...
-based desktop software called Java Desktop System
Java Desktop System
OpenSolaris Desktop, formerly Java Desktop System , is a desktop environment now developed by Oracle Corporation available for Solaris, and formerly Linux....
(originally code-named "Madhatter") was first distributed as a Linux implementation then offered as part of the Solaris operating system. Sun supported its Java Enterprise System (a middleware stack) on Linux. It released the source code for Solaris under the open-source Common Development and Distribution License
Common Development and Distribution License
Common Development and Distribution License is a free software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License , version 1.1....
, via the OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris was an open source computer operating system based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems. It was also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the software...
community. Sun's positioning includes a commitment to indemnify users of some software from intellectual property disputes concerning that software. It offers support services on a variety of pricing bases, including per-employee and per-socket.
A 2006 report prepared for the EU by UNU-MERIT
UNU-MERIT
UNU-MERIT is a joint research and training institute of United Nations University and Maastricht University , based in Maastricht in the southeast Netherlands....
stated that Sun was the largest corporate contributor to open source movements in the world. According to this report, Sun's open source contributions exceed the combined total of the next five largest commercial contributors.
Operating systems
Sun is best known for its UnixUnix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
systems, which have a reputation for system stability and a consistent design philosophy.
Sun's first workstation shipped with UniSoft
UniSoft
UniSoft Corporation is a former Unix vendor that now works on software for digital television development and broadcast.- History :UniSoft was founded in 1981, initially working as a Unix porting house, completing over 225 Unix ports to numerous CPU architectures. Its port of Version 7 Unix was the...
V7 Unix
Version 7 Unix
Seventh Edition Unix, also called Version 7 Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix operating system. V7, released in 1979, was the last Bell Laboratories release to see widespread distribution before the commercialization of Unix by AT&T in the early 1980s...
. Later in 1982 Sun began providing SunOS
SunOS
SunOS is a version of the Unix operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems. The SunOS name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4 of SunOS...
, a customized 4.1BSD
Berkeley Software Distribution
Berkeley Software Distribution is a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995...
Unix, as the operating system for its workstations.
In the late 1980s, AT&T tapped Sun to help them develop the next release of their branded UNIX, and in 1988 announced they would purchase up to a 20% stake in Sun. UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4) was jointly developed by AT&T and Sun; this partnership triggered concern among Sun's competitors, many of whom banded together to form the Open Software Foundation
Open Software Foundation
The Open Software Foundation was a not-for-profit organization founded in 1988 under the U.S. National Cooperative Research Act of 1984 to create an open standard for an implementation of the UNIX operating system.-History:...
(OSF). By the mid-1990s, the ensuing Unix wars
Unix wars
The Unix wars were the struggles between vendors of the Unix computer operating system in the late 1980s and early 1990s to set the standard for Unix thenceforth.- Origins :...
had largely subsided, AT&T had sold off their Unix interests, and the relationship between the two companies was significantly reduced.
Sun used SVR4 as the foundation for Solaris 2, which became the successor to SunOS.
From 1992 Sun also sold INTERACTIVE UNIX
INTERACTIVE UNIX
INTERACTIVE UNIX System V/386 is a port of the UNIX System V operating system for Intel x86 processors.The system was first released by INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation as 386/ix in 1985. At that time it was based on System V.3.0. Later versions were based on System V.3.2...
, an operating system it acquired when it bought INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation
INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation
INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation was a US-based software company and the first vendor of the Unix operating system outside AT&T, operating from Santa Monica, CA....
from Eastman Kodak Company. This was a popular UNIX variant for the PC platform and a major competitor to market leader SCO UNIX. Sun's focus on INTERACTIVE UNIX diminished in favor of Solaris on both SPARC and x86 systems; it was dropped as a product in 2001.
Sun offered a separate variant of Solaris called Trusted Solaris, which included augmented security features such as multilevel security
Multilevel security
Multilevel security or Multiple Levels of Security is the application of a computer system to process information with different sensitivities , permit simultaneous access by users with different security clearances and needs-to-know, and prevent users from obtaining access to information for...
and a least privilege access model. Solaris 10 included many of the same capabilities as Trusted Solaris when it was released in 2005; the Solaris November 10, 2006 update included Solaris Trusted Extensions, which give it the remaining capabilities needed to make it the functional successor to Trusted Solaris.
Following several years of difficult competition and loss of server market share to competitors' Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
-based systems, Sun began to include Linux as part of its strategy in 2002. Sun supported both Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux-based operating system developed by Red Hat and targeted toward the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86, x86-64, Itanium, PowerPC and IBM System z, and desktop versions for x86 and x86-64...
and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a Linux distribution supplied by SUSE and targeted at the business market. It is targeted for servers, mainframes, and workstations but can be installed on desktop computers for testing as well. New major versions are released at an interval of 3-4 years, while...
on its x64 systems; companies such as Canonical Ltd.
Canonical Ltd.
Canonical Ltd. is a private company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth to market commercial support and related services for Ubuntu Linux and related projects. Canonical is registered in London and employs staff around the world...
, Wind River Systems
Wind River Systems
Wind River Systems, Inc. is a company providing embedded systems, development tools for embedded systems, middleware, and other types of software. The company was founded in Berkeley, California in 1981 by Jerry Fiddler and David Wilner. On June 4, 2009, Wind River announced that Intel had bought...
and MontaVista
MontaVista
MontaVista Software is a software developer that develops embedded Linux system software, development tools, and related software. Its products are targeted at other corporations developing embedded systems such as automotive electronics, communications equipment, mobile phones, and other...
also supported their versions of Linux on Sun's SPARC-based systems.
In 2004, after having cultivated a reputation as one of Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
's most vocal antagonists, Sun entered into a joint relationship with them, resolving various legal entanglements between the two companies and receiving US$1.95 billion in settlement payments from them. Sun supported Microsoft Windows on its x64 systems, and announced other collaborative agreements with Microsoft, including plans to support each others' virtualization environments.
Java platform
The Java platform was developed at Sun in the early 1990s with the objective of allowing programs to function regardless of the device they were used on, sparking the slogan "Write once, run anywhereWrite once, run anywhere
"Write once, run anywhere" , or sometimes write once, run everywhere , is a slogan created by Sun Microsystems to illustrate the cross-platform benefits of the Java language. Ideally, this means Java can be developed on any device, compiled into a standard bytecode and be expected to run on any...
" (WORA). While this objective was not entirely achieved (prompting the riposte "Write once, debug everywhere"), Java is regarded as being largely hardware- and operating system-independent.
Java was initially promoted as a platform for client-side applets
Java applet
A Java applet is an applet delivered to users in the form of Java bytecode. Java applets can run in a Web browser using a Java Virtual Machine , or in Sun's AppletViewer, a stand-alone tool for testing applets...
running inside web browsers. Early examples of Java applications were the HotJava
HotJava
HotJava was a modular, extensible web browser from Sun Microsystems implemented in Java. It was the first browser to support Java applets, and was Sun's demonstration platform for the then new technology. It has since been discontinued and is now no longer supported...
web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
and the HotJava Views
HotJava Views
HotJava Views was a productivity software suite developed by Sun Microsystems and implemented in Java. It was released in 1996 and was intended primarily for JavaStation or other JavaOS-based network computers.HotJava Views consisted of four applications:...
suite. However, since then Java has been more successful on the server side
Server-side
Server-side refers to operations that are performed by the server in a client–server relationship in computer networking.Typically, a server is a software program, such as a web server, that runs on a remote server, reachable from a user's local computer or workstation...
of the Internet.
The platform consists of three major parts: the Java programming language, the Java Virtual Machine
Java Virtual Machine
A Java virtual machine is a virtual machine capable of executing Java bytecode. It is the code execution component of the Java software platform. Sun Microsystems stated that there are over 4.5 billion JVM-enabled devices.-Overview:...
(JVM), and several Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The design of the Java platform is controlled by the vendor and user community through the Java Community Process
Java Community Process
The Java Community Process or JCP, established in 1998, is a formalized process that allows interested parties to get involved in the definition of future versions and features of the Java platform....
(JCP).
Java is an object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction,...
language. Since its introduction in late 1995, it became one of the world's most popular programming languages.
Java programs are compiled to byte code, which can be executed by any JVM, regardless of the environment.
The Java API
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
s provide an extensive set of library routines. These APIs evolved into the Standard Edition (Java SE), which provides basic infrastructure and GUI functionality; the Enterprise Edition (Java EE), aimed at large software companies implementing enterprise-class application servers; and the Micro Edition (Java ME), used to build software for devices with limited resources, such as mobile devices.
On November 13, 2006, Sun announced it would be licensing its Java implementation under the GNU General Public License
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
; it released its Java compiler
Java compiler
A Java compiler is a compiler for the Java programming language. The most common form of output from a Java compiler is Java class files containing platform-neutral Java bytecode...
and JVM at that time.
In February 2009 Sun entered a battle with Microsoft and Adobe Systems, which promoted rival platforms to build software applications for the Internet. JavaFX
JavaFX
JavaFX is a software platform for creating and delivering rich Internet applications that can run across a wide variety of connected devices....
was a development platform for music, video and other applications that builds on the Java programming language.
Office suite
In 1999, Sun acquired the German software company StarDivision and with it StarOfficeStarOffice
StarOffice, known briefly as Oracle Open Office before its discontinuation in 2010, is a proprietary office suite. It was originally developed by StarDivision which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999...
, which it released as the office suite
Office suite
In computing, an office suite, sometimes called an office software suite or productivity suite is a collection of programs intended to be used by knowledge workers...
OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org, commonly known as OOo or OpenOffice, is an open-source application suite whose main components are for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. OpenOffice is available for a number of different computer operating systems, is distributed as free software...
under both GNU LGPL and the SISSL (Sun Industry Standards Source License
Sun Industry Standards Source License
The Sun Industry Standards Source License is now a retired free and open source license, recognized as such by the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative . Under SISSL, developers could modify and distribute source code and derived binaries freely. Furthermore, developers could...
). OpenOffice.org supported Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...
file formats (though not perfectly), was available on many platforms (primarily Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
, Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
, Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
, and Solaris) and was used in the open source community.
The StarOffice product was a closed-source product based on OpenOffice.org. The principal differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org were that StarOffice was supported by Sun, was available as either a single-user retail box kit or as per-user blocks of licensing for the enterprise, and included a wider range of fonts and document templates and a commercial quality spellchecker. StarOffice also contained commercially licensed functions and add-ons; in OpenOffice.org these were either replaced by open-source or free variants, or are not present at all. Both packages had native support for the OpenDocument
OpenDocument
The Open Document Format for Office Applications is an XML-based file format for representing electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents....
format.
Virtualization and datacenter automation software
Sun xVM
Sun xVM is a product group from Sun Microsystems that addresses virtualization technology on x86 platforms.-History:Sun originally announced the xVM product family in October 2007 as a broader product line...
virtualization and datacenter automation product suite for commodity hardware. Sun also acquired VirtualBox
VirtualBox
Oracle VM VirtualBox is an x86 virtualization software package, originally created by software company Innotek GmbH, purchased by Sun Microsystems, and now developed by Oracle Corporation as part of its family of virtualization products...
in 2008. Earlier virtualization technologies from Sun like Dynamic System Domains and Dynamic Reconfiguration were specifically designed for high-end SPARC servers, and Logical Domains
Logical Domains
Logical Domains is the server virtualization and partitioning technology from Sun Microsystems released in April 2007. It has been re-branded as Oracle VM Server for SPARC since Oracle Corporation completed the acquisition of Sun in January 2010. Each domain is a full virtual machine with a...
only supports the UltraSPARC T1/T2/T2 Plus server platforms. Sun marketed Sun Ops Center provisioning software for datacenter automation.
On the client side, Sun offered virtual desktop
Virtual desktop
In computing, a virtual desktop is a term used with respect to user interfaces, usually within the WIMP paradigm, to describe ways in which the size of a computer's desktop environment is expanded beyond the physical limits of the screen's real estate through the use of software, This saves space...
solutions. Desktop environments and applications could be hosted in a datacenter, with users accessing these environments from a wide range of client devices, including Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
PCs, Sun Ray virtual display clients
Sun Ray
The Sun Ray from Oracle is a stateless thin client solution aimed at corporate environments, originally introduced by Sun Microsystems in September 1999...
, Apple Macintoshes, PDAs or any combination of supported devices. A variety of networks were supported, from LAN to WAN or the public Internet. Virtual desktop products included Sun Ray Server Software, Sun Secure Global Desktop
Sun Secure Global Desktop
Oracle Secure Global Desktop software provides secure access to both published applications and published desktops running on Microsoft Windows, Unix, mainframe and System i systems via a variety of clients ranging from fat PCs to thin clients such as Sun Rays.-History:In 1993 the Santa Cruz...
and Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
Sun VDI
Oracle VDI software is a connection broker that provides desktop virtualization to replace personal computers with virtual machines on a server. Users can access these VMs though any RDP client, or through the web via Sun Secure Global Desktop .Oracle Corporation released Oracle VDI 3.2.2 on...
.
Database management systems
Sun acquired MySQL ABMySQL AB
MySQL AB was a software company. MySQL AB is the creator of MySQL, a relational database management system, as well as related products such as MySQL Cluster...
, the developer of the MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
database in 2008 for US$ 1 billion. CEO Jonathan Schwartz
Jonathan I. Schwartz
Jonathan Ian Schwartz is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Picture of Health. He was formerly the President and CEO of Sun Microsystems prior to its acquisition by Oracle, and previously the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lighthouse Design, Ltd., a software company focused on...
mentioned in his blog that optimizing the performance of MySQL was one of the priorities of the acquisition. In February 2008, Sun began to publish results of the MySQL performance optimization work. Sun contributed to the PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software...
project. On the Java platform, Sun contributed to and supported Java DB.
Other software
Sun offered other software products for software development and infrastructure services. Many were developed in house; others came from acquisitions, including TarantellaTarantella, Inc.
Santa Cruz Operation was a software company based in Santa Cruz, California which was best known for selling three Unix variants for Intel x86 processors: Xenix, SCO UNIX , and UnixWare. Eric Raymond, in his book The Art of Unix Programming, calls SCO the "first Unix company"...
, Waveset Technologies, SeeBeyond, and Vaau. Sun acquired many of the Netscape
Netscape
Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...
non-browser software products as part a deal involving Netscape's merger with AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...
. These software products were initially offered under the iPlanet
IPlanet
iPlanet was a product brand that was used jointly by Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications Corporation when delivering software and services as part of a non-exclusive cross marketing deal that was also known as "A Sun|Netscape Alliance"....
brand; once the Sun-Netscape alliance ended, they were re-branded as Sun ONE
Sun ONE
Sun ONE was a brand under which Sun Microsystems used to market server software products. Sun ONE stands for Sun Open Net Environment.The Sun ONE brand was primarily used for products that resulted from Sun's alliance with Netscape Communications Corporation...
(Sun Open Network Environment), and then the Sun Java System
Sun Java System
Sun Java System is a brand used by Sun Microsystems to market computer software. The Sun Java System brand superseded the Sun ONE brand on September 2003...
.
Sun's middleware
Middleware
Middleware is computer software that connects software components or people and their applications. The software consists of a set of services that allows multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact...
solution stack
Solution stack
In computing, a solution stack is a set of software subsystems or components needed to deliver a fully functional solution, e.g. a product or service....
was branded as the Java Enterprise System (or JES), and marketed for web and application serving, communication, calendaring, directory, identity management and service-oriented architecture
Service-oriented architecture
In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...
. Sun's Open ESB
Open ESB
Open ESB is a Java based open source enterprise service bus. Open ESB can be used as a platform for both Enterprise Application Integration and SOA. Open ESB is built on open standards....
and other software suites were available free of charge on systems running Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux-based operating system developed by Red Hat and targeted toward the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86, x86-64, Itanium, PowerPC and IBM System z, and desktop versions for x86 and x86-64...
, HP-UX
HP-UX
HP-UX is Hewlett-Packard's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on UNIX System V and first released in 1984...
, and Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
, with support available optionally.
Sun developed data center management software products, which included the Solaris Cluster high availability software, and a grid
Grid computing
Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files...
management package called Sun Grid Engine
Sun Grid Engine
Oracle Grid Engine, previously known as Sun Grid Engine , previously known as CODINE or GRD , is an open source batch-queuing system, developed and supported by Sun Microsystems...
and firewall software such as SunScreen
Sunscreen
Sunblock is a lotion, spray, gel or other topical product that absorbs or reflects some of the sun's ultraviolet radiation on the skin exposed to sunlight and thus helps protect against sunburn...
.
For Network Equipment Provider
Network Equipment Provider
Network Equipment Providers are companies that provide communication solutions to Service Providers like fixed or mobile operators as well as to Enterprise customers. If you place a call on your mobile phone, surf the internet, join a conference call or watch a video on demand through IPTV – it...
s and telecommunications customers, Sun developed the Sun Netra
Sun Netra
The Sun Netra brand has been used for a variety of server computers from Sun Microsystems since 1994. The original Netra servers were re-badged SPARCstation and Sun Ultra series systems bundled with server application software.Later the Netra name was mainly used for a series of ruggedized ...
High-Availability Suite.
Sun produced compilers and development tools under the Sun Studio
Sun Studio (software)
The Oracle Solaris Studio compiler suite is Oracle's flagship software development product for Solaris and Linux. It was formerly known as Sun Studio...
brand, for building and developing Solaris and Linux applications.
Sun entered the Software as a Service
Software as a Service
Software as a service , sometimes referred to as "on-demand software," is a software delivery model in which software and its associated data are hosted centrally and are typically accessed by users using a thin client, normally using a web browser over the Internet.SaaS has become a common...
(SaaS) market with zembly
Zembly
Zembly was a browser-based development environment from Sun Microsystemsthat enabled social programmingof applications for Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial, iPhone web applications, and other social platforms, as well as web widgets...
, a social cloud-based computing platform and Project Kenai
Project Kenai
Project Kenai is a collaborative hosting site for free and open source projects, launched by Sun Microsystems and now owned by Oracle. The service will be discontinued move the existing Kenai.com projects over to the Java.net domain for public use as part of Oracle's restructuring of...
, an open-source project hosting service.
Storage
Sun sold its own storage systems to complement its system offerings; it has also made several storage-related acquisitions.On June 2, 2005, Sun announced it would purchase Storage Technology Corporation
Storage Technology Corporation
Storage Technology Corporation , aka STC until about 1983, is a data storage technology company. Current StorageTek products focus on tape backup equipment and software to manage storage systems. New products include data retention systems, which they call information lifecycle management, or ILM....
(StorageTek) for US$4.1 billion in cash, or $37.00 per share, a deal completed in August 2005.
In 2006, Sun introduced the Sun StorageTek 5800 System, the first application-aware programmable storage solution. In 2008, Sun contributed the source code of the StorageTek 5800 System under the BSD license.
Sun announced the Sun Open Storage
Sun Open Storage
Sun Open Storage is an open source computer data storage platform developed by Sun Microsystems. Based on industry-standard hardware and open source technologies from Sun Microsystems, Sun Open Storage offers an open storage architecture without vendor lock-in....
platform in 2008 built with open source technologies.
In late 2008 Sun announced the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems (codenamed Amber Road). Transparent placement of data in the systems' solid-state drive
Solid-state drive
A solid-state drive , sometimes called a solid-state disk or electronic disk, is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional block i/o hard disk drive...
s (SSD) and conventional hard drives was managed by ZFS
ZFS
In computing, ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include data integrity verification against data corruption modes , support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management,...
to take advantage of the speed of SSDs and the economy of conventional hard disks.
Other storage products included Sun Fire X4500
Sun Fire X4500
The Sun Fire X4500 data server integrates server and storage technologies. It was announced in July, 2006 and is part of the Sun Fire server line from Sun Microsystems....
storage server and SAM-QFS
QFS
QFS is an open source filesystem from Sun Microsystems. It is tightly integrated with SAM, the Storage and Archive Manager, and hence is often referred to as SAM-QFS. SAM provides the functionality of a Hierarchical Storage Manager....
filesystem and storage management software.
HPC solutions
Sun marketed the Sun Constellation SystemSun Constellation System
Sun Constellation System is an open petascale computing environment introduced by Sun Microsystems in 2007.- Main hardware components :* Sun Blade 6048 Modular System** ** * * * * - Software stack :* OpenSolaris or Linux* Sun Grid Engine...
for High-Performance Computing
High-performance computing
High-performance computing uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Today, computer systems approaching the teraflops-region are counted as HPC-computers.-Overview:...
(HPC). Even before the introduction of the Sun Constellation System in 2007, Sun's products were in use in many of the TOP500
TOP500
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...
systems and supercomputing centers:
- LustreLustre (file system)Lustre is a massively parallel distributed file system, generally used for large scale cluster computing. The name Lustre is a portmanteau word derived from Linux and cluster...
– used by 7 of the top 10 supercomputers in 2008, as well as other industries that need high-performance storage: 6 major oil companies (including BPBPBP p.l.c. is a global oil and gas company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the third-largest energy company and fourth-largest company in the world measured by revenues and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors"...
, ShellRoyal Dutch ShellRoyal Dutch Shell plc , commonly known as Shell, is a global oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the fifth-largest company in the world according to a composite measure by Forbes magazine and one of the six...
, and ExxonMobilExxonMobilExxon Mobil Corporation or ExxonMobil, is an American multinational oil and gas corporation. It is a direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil company, and was formed on November 30, 1999, by the merger of Exxon and Mobil. Its headquarters are in Irving, Texas...
), chip-design (including SynopsysSynopsysSynopsys, Inc. is one of the largest companies in the Electronic Design Automation industry. Synopsys' first and best-known product is Design Compiler, a logic-synthesis tool. Synopsys offers a wide range of other products used in the design of an application-specific integrated circuit...
and SonySony, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
), and the movie-industry (including Harry Potter and Spider-ManSpider-ManSpider-Man is a fictional Marvel Comics superhero. The character was created by writer-editor Stan Lee and writer-artist Steve Ditko. He first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15...
). - Sun Fire X4500Sun Fire X4500The Sun Fire X4500 data server integrates server and storage technologies. It was announced in July, 2006 and is part of the Sun Fire server line from Sun Microsystems....
– used by high energy physics supercomputers to run dCache - Sun Grid EngineSun Grid EngineOracle Grid Engine, previously known as Sun Grid Engine , previously known as CODINE or GRD , is an open source batch-queuing system, developed and supported by Sun Microsystems...
– a popular workload scheduler for clusters and compute farms - Sun Visualization SystemSun Visualization SystemSun Visualization System was a sharable visualization solution introduced by Sun Microsystems in January of 2007. It used other Sun technologies, including Sun servers, Solaris, Sun Ray Ultra-Thin Clients, and Sun Grid Engine...
– allows users of the TeraGridTeraGridTeraGrid is an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011....
to remotely access the 3D rendering capabilities of the Maverick system at the University of Texas at AustinUniversity of Texas at AustinThe University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin... - Sun Modular DatacenterSun Modular DatacenterSun Modular Datacenter is a portable data center built into a standard 20-foot intermodal container manufactured and marketed by Sun Microsystems . An external chiller and power are required for the operation of a Sun MD...
(Project Blackbox) – two Sun MD S20 units are used by the Stanford Linear Accelerator CenterStanford Linear Accelerator CenterThe SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S...
The Sun HPC ClusterTools product was a set of Message Passing Interface
Message Passing Interface
Message Passing Interface is a standardized and portable message-passing system designed by a group of researchers from academia and industry to function on a wide variety of parallel computers...
(MPI) libraries and tools for running parallel jobs on Solaris HPC clusters. Beginning with version 7.0, Sun switched from its own implementation of MPI to Open MPI
Open MPI
Open MPI is a Message Passing Interface library project combining technologies and resources from several other projects . It is used by many TOP500 supercomputers including Roadrunner, which was the world's fastest supercomputer from June 2008 to November 2009, and K computer, the fastest...
, and donated engineering resources to the Open MPI project.
Sun was a participant in the OpenMP
OpenMP
OpenMP is an API that supports multi-platform shared memory multiprocessing programming in C, C++, and Fortran, on most processor architectures and operating systems, including Linux, Unix, AIX, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows platforms...
language committee. Sun Studio
Sun Studio (software)
The Oracle Solaris Studio compiler suite is Oracle's flagship software development product for Solaris and Linux. It was formerly known as Sun Studio...
compilers and tools implemented the OpenMP specification for shared memory parallelization.
In 2006, Sun built the TSUBAME supercomputer, which was until June 2008 the fastest supercomputer in Asia. Sun built Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center
Texas Advanced Computing Center
The Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is a research center for advanced computational science, engineering and technology. TACC is located on UT's J.J. Pickle Research Campus....
(TACC) in 2007. Ranger had a peak performance of over 500 TFLOPS, and was the 6th most powerful supercomputer on the TOP500
TOP500
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...
list in November 2008.
Sun announced an OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris was an open source computer operating system based on Solaris created by Sun Microsystems. It was also the name of the project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the software...
distribution that integrated many of Sun's HPC products and other 3rd-party solutions.
Staff
Notable Sun employees included John Gilmore, Josh Weiss, Whitfield DiffieWhitfield Diffie
Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie is an American cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography.Diffie and Martin Hellman's paper New Directions in Cryptography was published in 1976...
, Radia Perlman
Radia Perlman
Radia Joy Perlman is a software designer and network engineer sometimes referred to as the "Mother of the Internet." She is most famous for her invention of the spanning-tree protocol , which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation...
, Marc Tremblay
Marc Tremblay
Marc Tremblay is a distinguished engineer at Microsoft. Prior to joining Microsoft in April 2009, he was senior vice president and chief technology officer of the microelectronics business unit at Sun Microsystems. He was instrumental in the design of various microprocessors at Sun, including the...
, and Ned Freed
Ned Freed
Ned Freed has contributed as an IETF participant and RFC writer to a significant number of internet protocol standards.-Life:Edwin Earl "Ned" Freed was born in 1959 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He graduated from Groton School in 1978...
. Sun was an early advocate of Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
-based networked computing, promoting TCP/IP and especially NFS, as reflected in the company's motto "The Network Is The Computer", coined by John Gage
John Gage
John Burdette Gage was the 21st employee of Sun Microsystems, where he is credited with creating the phrase "the network is the computer." He served as Chief Researcher and Vice President of the Science Office for Sun, until leaving on June 9, 2008 to join Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a...
. James Gosling
James Gosling
James A. Gosling, OC is a computer scientist, best known as the father of the Java programming language.-Education and career:In 1977, Gosling received a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary...
led the team which developed the Java programming language
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
. Jon Bosak
Jon Bosak
Jon Bosak led the creation of the XML specification at the W3C. From 1996–2008, he worked for Sun Microsystems.-XML:Tim Bray, who was one of the editors of the XML specification, has this to say in his note on Bosak in his annotated version of the specification:In a 1999 posting to the xml-dev...
led the creation of the XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
specification at W3C.
Sun staff published articles on the company's blog site. Staff were encouraged to use the site to blog on any aspect of their work or personal life, with few restrictions placed on staff, other than commercially confidential material. Jonathan I. Schwartz
Jonathan I. Schwartz
Jonathan Ian Schwartz is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Picture of Health. He was formerly the President and CEO of Sun Microsystems prior to its acquisition by Oracle, and previously the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lighthouse Design, Ltd., a software company focused on...
was one of the first CEOs of large companies to regularly blog; his postings were frequently quoted and analyzed in the press.
Sale
Sun was sold to Oracle CorporationOracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
in 2009.
Sun's staff were asked to share anecdotes about their experiences at Sun. A web site containing videos, stories, and photographs from 27 years at Sun was made available on September 2, 2009.
In October, Sun announced a second round of thousands of employees to be laid off, blamed partially on delays in approval of the merger.
The transaction completed in early 2010.
In January 2011 Oracle agreed to pay $46 million to settle charges that it submitted false claims to US federal government agencies and paid "kickbacks" to systems integrators.
In February 2011 Sun's former Menlo Park, California
Menlo Park, California
Menlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...
campus of about 1000000 ft2 was sold, and it was announced that it would become headquarters for Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
.
The sprawling facility built around an enclosed courtyard had been nicknamed "Sun Quentin".
On September 1st 2011, Sun India legally became part of Oracle. It had been delayed due to legal issues in Indian court.
See also
- Callan Data SystemsCallan Data SystemsCallan Data Systems Inc., from 1980 to 1985 was an innovative but short-lived computer manufacturer, named after its founder, David Callan, and located in Westlake Village, California, USA....
- Global Education Learning Community
- HackathonHackathonA hackathon, a hacker neologism, is an event when programmers meet to do collaborative computer programming. The spirit of a hackathon is to collaboratively build programs and applications. Hackathons are typically between several days and a week in length...
- Interactive Systems CorporationINTERACTIVE Systems CorporationINTERACTIVE Systems Corporation was a US-based software company and the first vendor of the Unix operating system outside AT&T, operating from Santa Monica, CA....
- Liberty AllianceLiberty AllianceThe Liberty Alliance was formed in September 2001 by approximately 30 organizations to establish open standards, guidelines and best practices for identity management...
- List of computer system manufacturers
- NetBeansNetBeansNetBeans refers to both a platform framework for Java desktop applications, and an integrated development environment for developing with Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Groovy, C, C++, Scala, Clojure, and others...
- Open Source University MeetupOpen Source University MeetupThe Open Source University Meet-Up is a student developer organization sponsored by Sun Microsystems that educates its members about open-source technologies through technical demonstrations, access to web courses, and discounts on Sun Certification.-History:...
- Sun Certified ProfessionalSun Certified ProfessionalSun Certified Professional is a professional certification program by Sun Microsystems, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation. It is meant to verify a particular skillset in Sun technologies, especially for developers for whom Java is a primary requirement.- Oracle Certified Professional Java SE...
- Sun Modular DatacenterSun Modular DatacenterSun Modular Datacenter is a portable data center built into a standard 20-foot intermodal container manufactured and marketed by Sun Microsystems . An external chiller and power are required for the operation of a Sun MD...