Vendor lineage
Sun Microsystems - the network is the computer
Four Stanford-orbit founders, SPARC, Solaris, Java - the dot in dot-com, absorbed by Oracle in 2010.
Sun packed more industry-shaping ideas into 28 years than most vendors manage in a century: the workstation, the network-first slogan it took the world decades to catch up with, NFS, SPARC, Solaris, and Java. Its 2010 end inside Oracle scattered a diaspora that still runs the industry - including the ForgeRock and Arista stories elsewhere in this section.
From Andy Bechtolsheim's Stanford University Network workstation to Java running on billions of devices, Sun's arc is the arc of open systems itself - told in full in the profile below, with the bloodlines that lead out of it.
Founding stories
Sun Microsystems
Sun began as a Stanford graduate project with a business plan attached: Andy Bechtolsheim's SUN workstation - the Stanford University Network board - joined Vinod Khosla's ambition, Scott McNealy's operations, and, within months, Bill Joy, who carried Berkeley Unix in with him. The founding insight was in the name: computers were network citizens first. 'The network is the computer' sounded like marketing in 1984 when Sun published NFS as an open protocol; it reads like a prophecy now.
The timeline
- Four founders, one network
Workstations running BSD Unix with Ethernet on board by default - Sun ships the network-native computer while rivals still treat networking as an option.
- NFS, given away
Sun publishes the Network File System as an open, licensable protocol - files across the network become ordinary, and Sun's openness play becomes the industry's template.
- SPARC
Sun bets the company on its own RISC architecture and wins a decade of the workstation and server market; Solaris follows as the Unix to beat.
- Java changes the subject
Write once, run anywhere: Gosling's language turns Sun from a hardware vendor into the center of internet software - and eventually runs on billions of devices its inventor never sold.
- The dot in dot-com
Sun's E10000 servers power the internet buildout and the slogan writes itself; when the bubble bursts, the crash lands hardest on the company that sold the boom its hardware.
- The open-source pivot
OpenSolaris, and the open-sourcing of the identity stack as OpenSSO - the code five ex-Sun engineers would rescue as ForgeRock in 2010, a lifeboat story told on this section's Ping Identity page. MySQL joins for ~$1 billion in 2008.
- Oracle closes
January 27, 2010: Oracle completes the ~$7.4 billion acquisition after an EU review. Java, Solaris, and SPARC continue under new management; the Sun diaspora - Bechtolsheim to Arista among them - continues everywhere else.
Close date per the deal record; buyer's side on the Oracle page.
Flagship products and solutions
- SPARC and SolarisThe architecture-and-OS pair that defined enterprise Unix for two decades.
- JavaThe language and runtime that outgrew its maker - still one of the most deployed platforms on earth.
- NFSThe open network file protocol that made 'the network is the computer' a daily reality.
Key innovations
- Open protocols as strategyPublishing NFS and licensing SPARC taught the industry that openness could be a weapon - the playbook every open-source vendor since has run.
- The network-native computerSun shipped machines that assumed the network from day one, a decade before the rest of the industry accepted the premise.
Main markets
Sun's technologies persist inside Oracle and across the industry - Java everywhere, ZFS and DTrace in open descendants - while its people seeded Arista, ForgeRock, and half of Silicon Valley's infrastructure companies.
Analyst standing
- For the Unix-workstation and internet-server eras, Sun was the reference vendor the evaluations were written around - until commodity x86 and Linux unwrote the category itself.