Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems was an American company. Sun was endowed in Feburary, 1982. There were several Sun headquarters located in Santa Clara, California. The founders of Sun were Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy. It had nearly thirty nine thousand employees by the year 2006. This association sold computers and computer based hardware and software products. Information technology services were also provided by the crew. The institution is most popularly known for the development of JAVA language. It also created the Solaris Operating System and the File System for Networks. Sun remarkably contributed in the development of various technologies including RISC, UNIX, client and virtualized computing.
And then in the year 2009 it was declared that Sun will be acquired by Oracle.
History
The first design of Sun workstation i.e. the Sun-1 was made by Andy Bechtolsheim during his graduation days as a network communication project for the Stanford University. It had the Motorola 68000 processor with an efficient technique for memory management. It supported the operating system UNIX and also had collar for virtual memory management. Then on February, 1982 Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, discovered the Sun Microsystems. All of the developers were from Stanford University. Later Bill Joy also joined as the founder of Sun Microsystems. The sun got its name from the initials of the Stanford University Network. First quarter of Sun was made in 1982 itself, and it was profitable since then. By the year 1983 Sun was popularly known for producing around 68,000 system products with very high quality graphics. In the initial years of Sun’s development it gained a lot of profit. The shares rose immensely and kept increasing each day. But Sun saw downfall in the year 2000 and kept on seeing loss since then.
Hardware
In the initial decade of Sun’s discovery it was a low cost hardware product vendor. It used several different hardware based systems:
- Motorola based system: Sun used Motorola 68000 family processors. Sun 1 used 68000, Sun 2 used 68020 and Sun 3 used 68030.
- SPARC based system: With Sun 4 the company started using SPARC which was a RISC based processor. Sun has developed several series of the SPARC based computing.
- X86 based system: Later Sun started using systems based on x86.
Software
Sun was initially a hardware company but later started expanding its roots in the software industry as well, with one of its cofounder Bill being the leader UNIX developer at that time. Sun developed the java programming language and acquired software’s such as MySql and Virtual Box.
Storage System
Sun started selling its own storage devices as well and made several storage related acquisitions.
Sun and Java
Sun is popularly known as the developer of the Java language. Java was founded by JAMES GOSLING who worked with Sun for 26 years. In the year 1982, first version of java was launched named as “OAK”; it was renamed as java later. Sun received high amount of popularity with the development of this language as java is widely used since then and is one of the best languages available.
Acquisition by Oracle
Oracle Corporation acquired Sun in 2009. Later that year Sun fired thousands of its employees complaining about delays. Sun was fully acquired by Oracle in January 2010. In January 2011 Oracle paid $46 million to a company to which Sun gave false claims. In February 2011 Sun’s California campus was sold. All later Sun campuses came under story.
This was all about the immense empire that came, raised, fell and then was laid in hands of others.
This is a blog on Sun Microsystems.