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Conversations From the Corner Office
COMPANY HISTORY
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems was founded in 1982 by four Stanford students looking to capitalize on the untapped market for super-fast workstations and UNIX network servers. Netting more than $500 million in its first five years of existence, Sun would come to epitomize the era of big and successful Silicon Valley startups in the early 1980s.
In 1984, Scott McNealy took over the CEO spot from Vinod Khosla, another founding member. Two years later, McNealy took the company public and began expanding the company's catalogue. In 1989 Sun introduced the SPARC processor, and in the early 1990s it launched the Solaris operating system and began selling computer chips.
Arguably, no other development has wielded the same level of influence as Java, the computer programming language introduced in the mid-1990s that swiftly became the industry standard.
Java was also the cause of a long, legal battle between Sun and archrival Microsoft. In 2001, the company won a lawsuit against Microsoft for distributing incompatible versions of Java. Three years later, the two companies settled a lengthy dispute over antitrust and patent issues: Microsoft agreed to pay Sun close to $2 billion, while Sun announced the inclusion of Windows into some of its server lines.
In 2005, Sun launched an open-source version of Solaris, a significant step in the company's strategy to release the programming codes to all of its software. The company has promised to offer an open-source version of Java in the near future.
In April 2006, McNealy became chairman and oversees Sun's top 50 accounts. Jonathan Schwartz, the company's former chief operating officer, is now CEO.
Sun Microsystems is based in Santa Clara, Calif.
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