Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC.

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC.

Network File System (NFS) is a distributed file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems in 1984, allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a computer network much like local storage is accessed.

On April 20, 2009, it was announced that Oracle Corporation would acquire Sun for 7.4 billion.

The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation was completed on January 27, 2010.

Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing.

Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley (BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), IBM (AIX), and Sun Microsystems (Solaris).

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC.

SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) originally developed by Sun Microsystems.

Other technologies included the Java platform and NFS.

Java is a set of computer software and specifications developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems, which was later acquired by the Oracle Corporation, that provides a system for developing application software and deploying it in a cross-platform computing environment.

The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation, the Sun-1, was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. On February 24, 1982, Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems.

He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer.

At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California (part of Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

The site is the former home to Sun Microsystems and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

On April 20, 2009, it was announced that Oracle Corporation would acquire Sun for 7.4 billion.

2010: acquires Sun Microsystems

Bechtolsheim originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation.

It became the seed technology for many commercial products, including the original workstations from Sun Microsystems.

Bill Joy of Berkeley, a primary developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders.

He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003.

On February 24, 1982, Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems.

He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and the founder of Khosla Ventures.

Instead, the company chose to concentrate on processors optimized for multi-threading and multiprocessing, such as the UltraSPARC T1 processor (codenamed "Niagara").

Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T1 microprocessor, known until its 14 November 2005 announcement by its development codename "Niagara", is a multithreading, multicore CPU.

It was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced memory management unit (MMU) to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support.

The 68k instruction set was particularly well suited to implement Unix, and the 68000 and its successors became the dominant CPUs for Unix-based workstations including Sun workstations and Apollo/Domain workstations.

Sun originally used Motorola 68000 family central processing units for the Sun-1 through Sun-3 computer series.

Sun-1 was the first generation of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in May 1982.

In February 2005, Sun announced the Sun Grid, a grid computing deployment on which it offered utility computing services priced at US$1 per CPU/hour for processing and per GB/month for storage.

Sun Cloud was an on-demand Cloud computing service operated by Sun Microsystems prior to its acquisition by Oracle Corporation.

It licensed the computer design to other manufacturers, which typically used it to build Multibus-based systems running Unix from UniSoft.

A good example of this was Sun Microsystems with their Sun-1 and Sun-2 workstations.

These servers were announced on April 17, 2007, as the M-Series, part of the SPARC Enterprise series.

It was co-developed by Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu, and introduced in 2007.

1992: Praxsys Technologies, Inc., developers of the Windows emulation technology that eventually became Wabi

Wabi is a discontinued commercial software application from Sun Microsystems that implements the Windows Win16 API specification on Solaris; a version for Linux was also released by Caldera Systems.

1998: i-Planet, a small software company that produced the "Pony Espresso" mobile email client—its name (sans hyphen) for the Sun-Netscape software alliance

iPlanet was a product brand that was used jointly by Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications Corporation when delivering software and services as part of a non-exclusive cross marketing deal that was also known as "A Sun|Netscape Alliance".

Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing.

In the meantime, the Berkeley RISC effort had become so well known that it eventually became the name for the entire concept and in 1987 Sun Microsystems began shipping systems with the SPARC processor, directly based on the Berkeley RISC-II system.

1999: Star Division, German software company and with it StarOffice, which was later released as open source under the name OpenOffice.org

It was an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice, which Sun Microsystems acquired in 1999 for internal use.

It was also a major contributor to open-source software, as evidenced by its $1 billion purchase, in 2008, of MySQL, an open-source relational database management system.

Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB in 2008.

1999: Star Division, German software company and with it StarOffice, which was later released as open source under the name OpenOffice.org

It originated in 1985 as StarWriter by Star Division, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999.

1994: Thinking Machines Corporation hardware division

The firm filed for bankruptcy in 1994; its hardware and parallel computing software divisions were acquired in time by Sun Microsystems.