Sun Microsystems
More info
- Founded
- Founders
- Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy
- Type
- Computer and software company (acquired 2010)
- Successor
- Oracle
The company of workstations and server rooms — it gave the world Java, NFS and ZFS, and disappeared in the aftermath of the dotcom crash.
The name comes from Stanford University Network. Sun built Unix workstations on its own SPARC architecture running Solaris, and through the 1990s became the standard supplier to universities, banks and telecom operators. The slogan "the network is the computer" was early to an idea the cloud later realised.
Its contributions outlived the hardware: NFS for filesystems over the network, NIS, Java in 1995, and ZFS. The dotcom crash removed its customer base, and cheap Linux servers on x86 took the rest. Oracle bought Sun in 2010, putting Java and MySQL in new hands and prompting several projects to fork pre-emptively.