Prior to the formal festivities, the company founders met with a small group of press persons. Pondering recent developments in computing, Bill Joy, who is now concentrating on climate change solutions, recalled that Sun tried to do natural language processing , but the hardware was not fast enough.
Regarding the emergence of the iPhone, Joy said the advent of mobility and data networks has been transformational for society. He noted that Sun had that kind of vision with Java ME, with Sun trying to do programmable smartphones. Machine learning, though, will be as transformational as the smartphone, he added.
We were the leader of that parade. McNealy made headlines recently by hosting Pres. Donald Trump for a fundraiser in the San Francisco Bay Area, where technology companies have been viewed as leaning Democrat. He even stood up for Facebook, saying it is a for-profit business and should not be disallowed from deleting people, shadow-banning, or putting people on probation. As a result, we've become the dot in. Sun pioneered the use of shared software and hardware components among competing workstation manufacturers in order to create industry standards.
After making a reputation for itself as a designer of high-powered workstation computers and servers, Sun expanded its talents, positioning itself as an Internet and electronic-commerce specialist during the latter half of the s. The company's seminal achievement was the introduction of Java technology, the first universal software platform that enabled developers to write applications once to run on any computer.
The company maintained offices in countries, selling its products and services to the telecommunications, manufacturing, education, financial, and government markets. Sun began as a computer project designed by Andreas Bechtolsheim while he was a graduate student at Stanford.
His computer was a modification of a relatively new kind of computer, the workstation, which, like the PC personal computer , can be utilized by single users. The workstation, however, provides users with more power. Workstations are designed for network integration and equipped with high-resolution graphics, and are fast enough to handle demanding engineering and graphics tasks.
Unlike the first workstations, which had been introduced to the market only the previous year by Apollo Computer, Bechtolsheim's workstation used off-the-shelf parts, thus making it more affordable. Bechtolsheim not only shunned custom-made hardware, but also broke with the industry tradition of adhering to proprietary operating system software. Instead, he hoped to enable different workstation brands running on a common operating system to share data.
Within a year Bechtolsheim's project attracted the interest of Stanford M. They were named president and director of manufacturing, respectively, of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Bechtolsheim, who was the brains behind the hardware, became vice-president of technology. One of the first people the founders hired was Bill Joy, a Berkeley Ph. His task was to design the company's software. Sun's use of standard hardware components and standard operating system software produced short-term payoffs for the fledgling company.
Sun's workstations, unlike those of industry pioneer Apollo, operated on UNIX and from the outset networked easily with the hardware and software already on the market. In addition, although Sun's design could easily be copied, the strategy of using existing technologies allowed Sun to enter the market quickly with a low-priced machine. Sales grew rapidly as a result. Within six months of incorporation the company became profitable. Sun's founders, however, had their eyes on the mainstream technical market, dominated at that time by the major computer companies.
Sun's first big success in this area was the contract it signed in its second year with ComputerVision, a major CAD computer-aided design systems supplier that had decided to drop its proprietary hardware in favor of a new platform for its software products. ComputerVision had decided to sign a contract with Apollo, but, aggressively courted by Sun executives, the company reversed its decision and accepted a counteroffer made by Sun. Thus, Sun established its reputation as a serious player in the computer business and simultaneously earned the envious wrath of its competitors.
Expanding rapidly, Sun moved out of its original location in Santa Clara to a larger building in Mountain View, which became its new headquarters. In January Sun opened its first European sales office. In that same year Sun established a subsidiary, Sun Federal, to serve the government market. By Sun Federal was shipping more than half the workstations ordered by local, state, and federal government.
Sun's informal corporate culture attracted engineers from the top universities. At the same time Sun hired additional managers who had experience working at other leading computer companies. Also in McNealy took over as president, as Khosla realized his dream of being able to retire as a millionaire before the age of During this period Sun continued to promote open systems. In it began broadly licensing Joy's design of a distributed file system software, called NFS Network File System , that allowed data to be shared among many users in a network regardless of processor type, operating system, or communications system.
NFS soon became an industry standard. Sun was so successful with this strategy that in Apollo was forced to abandon its exclusive design and instead produce a system that operated with standard software. Between and Sun was the fastest-growing company in the United States, according to Forbes magazine, with a compound annual growth rate of percent.
It had become a public company with its successful initial public offering in The following year Sun surpassed Apollo in sales, and by the close of that year it had become the leader in workstation sales.
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