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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.

The founding is a Stanford story with a Berkeley coda. On 24 February 1982 three Stanford graduate students, Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim and Vinod Khosla, founded the company around the workstation Bechtolsheim had designed for the Stanford University Network project, a Motorola 68000 machine with a memory management unit built to run Unix with virtual memory; the name is the network's initials. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a primary developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution, joined soon after and is counted as a founder. Sun was the second company, after Apollo Computer, to specialise in workstations, and it was profitable from its first quarter, in July 1982.

Its own operating system traced that Berkeley line. SunOS, from 1982, was BSD-based through version 4.1.4 of September 1994, and the name is normally used for those releases only. In 1987 AT&T and Sun announced they would merge BSD, System V and Xenix into System V Release 4, and on 4 September 1991 Sun announced that its next major release would move from the BSD-derived source to SVR4 under a new overbrand, Solaris: SunOS 4.1.1 was rebranded Solaris 1.0, and SunOS 5.0 became part of Solaris 2.0. Solaris superseded SunOS in 1993, reached x86 with 2.1 that June and a single SPARC and x86 source base with 2.4 in 1994, and later gave the industry DTrace and ZFS. Sun kept shipping SunOS 4.1.3 and 4.1.4 until 27 December 1998 and supported them until 30 September 2003.

SPARC, Sun's own RISC architecture, arrived in 1987 with the Sun-4 line and went 64-bit with SPARC V9 in 1995. NFS made file systems a network service; John Gage coined The Network is the Computer; James Gosling led the team that built Java; Jon Bosak led the XML specification at the W3C. Whitfield Diffie, Radia Perlman and Ivan Sutherland were on the payroll. In June 2005 Sun released most of Solaris under the CDDL as OpenSolaris, and in 2008 it paid $1 billion for MySQL.

The end was announced on 20 April 2009: Oracle would acquire Sun for US$7.4 billion, US$5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. The European Commission opened an in-depth investigation on 3 September 2009, issued objections on 9 November and approved the deal on 21 January 2010, having satisfied itself that PostgreSQL was a credible alternative to MySQL; Oracle completed the acquisition on 27 January 2010. OpenSolaris was discontinued afterwards and forked as Illumos; Solaris became Oracle Solaris, and 11.4 followed in 2018. The company that had 38,600 employees near its 2006 peak closed as a line in an Oracle press release.

Founding stories

1982

Sun Microsystems

Santa Clara, California · Founders: Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy

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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.
From the company

This company no longer trades under this name. Now part of Oracle, which acquired Sun in 2010.

Sources