Sun Microsystems

Aerial photograph of the Sun headquarters campus in Santa Clara, California

Buildings 21 and 22 at Sun's headquarters campus in Santa Clara

Sun server racks at Seneca College (York Campus)

Sun Microsystems at the Computer Museum of America in Roswell, Georgia

A fountain within the Sun main campus in Santa Clara

American technology 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), VirtualBox, and SPARC microprocessors.

- Sun Microsystems

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VirtualBox

Type-2 hypervisor for x86 virtualization developed by Oracle Corporation.

VirtualBox was originally created by Innotek GmbH, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, which was in turn acquired by Oracle in 2010.

Unix

Family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.

Version 7 Unix, the Research Unix ancestor of all modern Unix systems

Ken Thompson (sitting) and Dennis Ritchie working together at a PDP-11

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE), part of the COSE initiative

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, principal developers of Research Unix

Photo from USENIX 1984, including Dennis Ritchie (center)

Plan 9 from Bell Labs extends Unix design principles and was developed as a successor to Unix.

Promotional license plate by Digital Equipment Corporation

HP9000 workstation running HP-UX, a certified Unix operating system

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), Sun Microsystems (SunOS/Solaris), HP/HPE (HP-UX), and IBM (AIX).

Java (programming language)

High-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible.

James Gosling, the creator of Java, in 2008.

The TIOBE programming language popularity index graph from 2002 to 2018. Java was steadily on the top from mid-2015 to early 2020.

Dependency graph of the Java Core classes (created with jdeps and Gephi)

Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in May 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform.

Workstation

Special computer designed for technical or scientific applications.

Sun SPARCstation 10 with CRT monitor, from the early 1990s

HP 9000 model 425 workstation running HP-UX 9 and Visual User Environment (VUE)

HP 9000 model 735 running HP-UX and the Common Desktop Environment (CDE)

A NeXTstation graphics workstation from 1990

Sony NEWS workstation: 2x 68030 @ 25 MHz, 1280x1024 256-color display

HP C8000 workstation running HP-UX 11i with CDE

Six workstations: four HP Z620, one HP Z820, one HP Z420.

Dell Precision 620MT with dual Pentium III processors

Sun Ultra 20 with AMD Opteron processor and Solaris 10

Dell Precision T3500 workstation with Intel Xeon processors

Hewlett-Packard Z820, an x86-64-based workstation

The term workstation has also been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT and IBM which opened the door for the 3D graphics animation revolution of the late 1990s.

Java (software platform)

A Java program running on a Windows Vista desktop computer (supported by Java 8, but not officially by later versions, such as Java 11)

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.

MySQL

Open-source relational database management system .

David Axmark (left) and Michael "Monty" Widenius, founders of MySQL AB, in 2003

Geir Høydalsvik, current Senior Software Development Director for MySQL at Oracle in 2018

LAMP software bundle, displayed here together with Squid.

MySQL was owned and sponsored by the Swedish company MySQL AB, which was bought by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation).

Santa Clara, California

City in Santa Clara County, California.

Mission Santa Clara de Asís was founded by the Spanish in 1777.

The 1847 Battle of Santa Clara, fought between the Americans and the Californios, was one of the last battles of the Conquest of California.

Statue of Santa Clara de Asís in Civic Center Park

The Carmelite Convent of the Infant Jesus, built in 1917 in a Spanish Colonial Revival style

Santa Clara University, the oldest university in California

The Saint Clare School, the oldest private elementary school in California

Levi's Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers

Santa Clara station, served by Caltrain, ACE, and Amtrak

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

Berkeley Software Distribution

Discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley.

Simplified evolution of Unix systems. Not shown are Junos, PlayStation 3 system software and other proprietary forks.

The VAX-11/780, a typical minicomputer used for early BSD timesharing systems

"4.3 BSD UNIX" from the University of Wisconsin circa 1987. System startup and login.

4.3 BSD from the University of Wisconsin. Displaying the man page for Franz Lisp

Tape for SunOS 4.1.1, a 4.3BSD derivative

Sony NEWS workstation running the BSD-based NEWS-OS operating system

In the 1980s, BSD was widely adopted by workstation vendors in the form of proprietary Unix variants such as DEC Ultrix and Sun Microsystems SunOS due to its permissive licensing and familiarity to many technology company founders and engineers.

Oracle Solaris

Screenshot of Java Desktop System on Solaris 10

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) was open sourced in August 2012. This is a screenshot of CDE running on Solaris 10.

Screenshot of the Java Desktop System (JDS) running on Solaris 10.

Solaris is a proprietary Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems.

Motorola 68000

16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector.

Motorola MC68000 (leadless chip carrier (CLCC) package)

Motorola MC68000 (plastic leaded chip carrier (PLCC) package)

Two Hitachi 68HC000 CPUs being used on an arcade-game PCB

(IBM Instruments briefly sold the 68000-based IBM System 9000 laboratory computer systems.) The 68k instruction set is 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.