Sun Microsystems
![]() Logo used from the 1990s until acquisition by Oracle | |
![]() Headquarters campus in Santa Clara, California | |
Company type | Public |
---|---|
Industry | |
Founded | February 24, 1982 |
Founders | |
Defunct | January 27, 2010 |
Fate | Acquired by Oracle Corporation |
Headquarters | , U.S. |
Products |
|
Owner | Oracle Corporation (2010) |
Number of employees | 38,600 (near peak, 2006)[1] |
Website | www (see: archived version at the Wayback Machine) |
Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010
Sun products included
In general, Sun was a proponent of open systems, particularly Unix. It was also a major contributor to
History
|
The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix
On February 24, 1982, Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Vinod Khosla, all Stanford graduate students, founded 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.[8] The company was the second, after rival Apollo Computer, to specialize in workstations.[9] The name "Sun" is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network (SUN).[10][11][12] Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982.
By 1983, Sun was known for producing
Sun's logo, which features four interleaved copies of the word sun in the form of a rotationally symmetric ambigram, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt, also of Stanford. The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently rotated to stand on one corner and re-colored purple, and later blue.
Dot-com bubble and aftermath
During the dot-com bubble, Sun began making more money, with its stock rising as high as $250 per share.[17] It also began spending much more, hiring workers and building itself out. Some of this was because of genuine demand, but much was from web start-up companies anticipating business that would never happen. In 2000, the bubble burst.[18] Sales in Sun's important hardware division went into free-fall as customers closed shop and auctioned high-end servers.
Several quarters of steep losses led to executive departures, rounds of layoffs,[19][20][21] and other cost cutting. In December 2001, the stock fell to the 1998, pre-bubble level of about $100. It continued to fall, faster than many other technology companies. A year later, it had reached below $10 (a tenth of what it was in 1990), but it eventually bounced back to $20. In mid-2004, Sun closed their Newark, California, factory and consolidated all manufacturing to Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland.[22] In 2006, the rest of the Newark campus was put on the market.[23]
Post-crash focus



In 2004, Sun canceled two major processor projects which emphasized high instruction-level parallelism and operating frequency. Instead, the company chose to concentrate on processors optimized for multi-threading and multiprocessing, such as the UltraSPARC T1 processor (codenamed "Niagara"). The company also announced a collaboration with Fujitsu to use the Japanese company's processor chips in mid-range and high-end Sun servers. These servers were announced on April 17, 2007, as the M-Series, part of the SPARC Enterprise series.
In February 2005, Sun announced the
In January 2005, Sun reported a net profit of $19 million for fiscal 2005 second quarter, for the first time in three years. This was followed by net loss of $9 million on
Sun had engineering groups in
In 2007–2008, Sun posted revenue of $13.8 billion and had $2 billion in cash. First-quarter 2008 losses were $1.68 billion; revenue fell 7% to $12.99 billion. Sun's stock lost 80% of its value November 2007 to November 2008, reducing the company's market value to $3 billion. With falling sales to large corporate clients, Sun announced plans to lay off 5,000 to 6,000 workers, or 15–18% of its work force. It expected to save $700 million to $800 million a year as a result of the moves, while also taking up to $600 million in charges.[27]
Sun acquisitions
![]() |
- 1987: Trancept Systems, a high-performance graphics hardware company[28]
- 1987: Sitka Corp, networking systems linking the Macintosh with IBM PCs[29]
- 1987: Centram Systems West, maker of networking softwarefor PCs, Macs and Sun systems
- 1988: Folio, Inc., developer of intelligent font scaling technology and the F3 font format[30]
- 1991: Eastman Kodak Company
- 1992: Praxsys Technologies, Inc., developers of the Windows emulation technology that eventually became Wabi[31]
- 1994: Thinking Machines Corporation hardware division
- 1996: Lighthouse Design, Ltd.[32]
- 1996: Cray Business Systems Division, from Silicon Graphics[33]
- 1996: Integrated Micro Products, specializing in fault tolerantservers
- 1996: Thinking Machines Corporation software division
- February 1997: LongView Technologies, LLC[34]
- August 1997: Diba, technology supplier for the Information Appliance industry[35]
- September 1997: Chorus Systèmes SA, creators of ChorusOS[36]
- November 1997: Encore Computer Corporation's storage business[37]
- 1998: RedCape Software
- 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
- June 1998: Dakota Scientific Software, Inc.—development tools for high-performance computing[38]
- July 1998: NetDynamics[39]—developers of the NetDynamics Application Server[40]
- October 1998: Beduin,[41] small software company that produced the "Impact" small-footprint Java-based Web browser for mobile devices.
- 1999: Star Division, German software company and with it StarOffice, which was later released as open source under the name OpenOffice.org
- 1999: MAXSTRAT Corporation, a company in Milpitas, California selling Fibre Channel storage servers.
- October 1999: Forté Software, an enterprise software company specializing in integration solutions and developer of the Forte 4GL[42]
- 1999: TeamWare
- 1999: NetBeans, produced a modular IDE written in Java, based on a student project at Charles University in Prague
- March 2000: Innosoft International, Inc. a software company specializing in highly scalable MTAs (PMDF) and Directory Services.
- July 2000: Gridware, a software company whose products managed the distribution of computing jobs across multiple computers[43]
- September 2000: Cobalt Networks, an Internet appliance manufacturer for $2 billion[44]
- December 2000: HighGround, with a suite of Web-based management solutions[45]
- 2001: LSC, Inc., an Eagan, Minnesota company that developed Storage and Archive Management File System (SAM-FS) and Quick File System QFS file systems for backup and archive
- March 2001: InfraSearch, a peer-to-peer search company based in Burlingame.[46]
- March 2002: Clustra Systems[47]
- June 2002: Afara Websystems, developed SPARC processor–based technology[48]
- September 2002: Pirus Networks, intelligent storage services[49]
- November 2002: Terraspring, infrastructure automation software[50]
- June 2003: Pixo, added to the Sun Content Delivery Server[51]
- August 2003: CenterRun, Inc.[52]
- December 2003: Waveset Technologies, identity management[53]
- January 2004 Nauticus Networks[54]
- February 2004: Kealia, founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, developed AMD-based 64-bit servers[55]
- January 2005: SevenSpace, a multi-platform managed services provider[56]
- May 2005: Tarantella, Inc. (formerly known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO)), for $25 million[57]
- June 2005: SeeBeyond, a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) software company for $387m[58]
- June 2005: Procom Technology, Inc.'s NAS IP Assets[52]
- August 2005: StorageTek, data storage technology company for $4.1 billion[59]
- February 2006: Aduva, software for Solaris and Linux patch management[60]
- October 2006: Neogent[61]
- April 2007: SavaJe, the SavaJe OS, a Java OS for mobile phones
- September 2007: Cluster File Systems, Inc.[62]
- November 2007: Vaau, Enterprise Role Management and identity compliance solutions[63]
- February 2008: MySQL AB, the company offering the open source database MySQL for $1 billion.[64]
- February 2008:
- April 2008: Montalvo Systems, x86 microprocessor startup acquired before first silicon
- January 2009: Q-layer, a software company with cloud computing solutions[67]
Major stockholders
As of May 11, 2009, the following shareholders held over 100,000 common shares of Sun[68] and at $9.50 per share offered by Oracle,[69] they received the amounts indicated when the acquisition closed.
Investor | Common shares | Value at merger |
---|---|---|
Barclays Global Investors |
37,606,708 | $357 million |
Scott McNealy | 14,566,433 | $138 million |
Ken Oshman | 584,985 | $5.5 million |
Jonathan I. Schwartz | 536,109 | $5 million |
James L. Barksdale | 231,785 | $2.2 million |
Michael E. Lehman | 106,684 | $1 million |
Hardware
For the first decade of Sun's history, the company positioned its products as technical
Motorola-based systems
Sun originally used
SPARC-based systems

In 1987, the company began using SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture), a RISC processor architecture of its own design, in its computer systems, starting with the
Sun developed several generations of SPARC-based computer systems, including the
line of servers.In the early 1990s the company began to extend its product line to include large-scale
In September 2004, Sun made available systems with
In November 2005, Sun launched the UltraSPARC T1, notable for its ability to concurrently run 32 threads of execution on 8 processor cores. Its intent was to drive more efficient use of CPU resources, which is of particular importance in data centers, where there is an increasing need to reduce power and air conditioning demands, much of which comes from the heat generated by CPUs. The T1 was followed in 2007 by the UltraSPARC T2, which extended the number of threads per core from 4 to 8. Sun has open sourced the design specifications of both the T1 and T2 processors via the OpenSPARC project.
In 2006, Sun ventured into the blade server (high density rack-mounted systems) market with the Sun Blade (distinct from the Sun Blade workstation).
In April 2007, Sun released the SPARC Enterprise server products, jointly designed by Sun and Fujitsu and based on Fujitsu
In April 2008, Sun released servers with UltraSPARC T2 Plus, which is an SMP capable version of UltraSPARC T2, available in 2 or 4 processor configurations. It was the first CoolThreads CPU with multi-processor capability and it made possible to build standard rack-mounted servers that could simultaneously process up to massive 256 CPU threads in hardware (Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440),[74][75] which is considered a record in the industry.
Since 2010, all further development of Sun machines based on SPARC architecture (including new
chips) is done as a part of Oracle Corporation hardware division.x86-based systems
In the late 1980s, Sun also marketed an
Sun's brief first foray into
In 1997, Sun acquired Diba, Inc., followed later by the acquisition of Cobalt Networks in 2000, with the aim of building network appliances (single function computers meant for consumers). Sun also marketed a Network Computer (a term popularized and eventually trademarked by Oracle); the JavaStation was a diskless system designed to run Java applications.
Although none of these business initiatives were particularly successful, the Cobalt purchase gave Sun a toehold for its return to the x86 hardware market. In 2002, Sun introduced its first general purpose x86 system, the LX50, based in part on previous Cobalt system expertise. This was also Sun's first system announced to support Linux as well as Solaris.
In 2003, Sun announced a strategic alliance with AMD to produce x86/x64 servers based on AMD's Opteron processor; this was followed shortly by Sun's acquisition of Kealia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on high-performance AMD-based servers.
The following year, Sun launched the Opteron-based Sun Fire V20z and V40z servers, and the Sun Java Workstation W1100z and W2100z workstations.
In September 2005 Sun unveiled a new range of Opteron-based servers: the Sun Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200 servers.[77] These were designed from scratch by a team led by Bechtolsheim to address heat and power consumption issues commonly faced in data centers. In July 2006, the Sun Fire X4500 and X4600 systems were introduced, extending a line of x64 systems that support not only Solaris, but also Linux and Microsoft Windows.
In January 2007 Sun announced a broad strategic alliance with
In May 2008 AMD announced its Operating System Research Center (OSRC) was expanding its focus to include optimization to Sun's OpenSolaris and xVM virtualization products for AMD processors.[80]
Software
Although Sun was initially known as a hardware company, its software history began with its founding in 1982; co-founder Bill Joy was one of the leading Unix developers of the time, having contributed the
Sun used community-based and open-source licensing of its major technologies, and for its support of its products with other open source technologies.
A 2006 report prepared for the EU by UNU-MERIT stated that Sun was the largest corporate contributor to open source movements in the world.[82] According to this report, Sun's open source contributions exceed the combined total of the next five largest commercial contributors.
Operating systems
Sun is best known for its Unix systems, which have a reputation for system stability and a consistent design philosophy.[citation needed]
Sun's first workstation shipped with UniSoft V7 Unix. Later in 1982 Sun began providing SunOS, a customized 4.2BSD Unix, as the operating system for its workstations. SunOS included
In the late 1980s, AT&T tapped Sun to help them develop the next release of their branded UNIX, and in 1988 announced they would purchase up to a 20% stake in Sun. had largely subsided, AT&T had sold off their Unix interests, and the relationship between the two companies was significantly reduced.
In the early 1990s, Brian P. Dougherty, founder of Berkeley Softworks (which would go on to be re-incorporated as the GeoWorks Corporation) accused the Java development team at Sun for studying GeoWorks's PC/GEOS operating system and incorporating features of PC/GEOS into their Unix-based operating system. Brian claimed that the object-oriented and flexible UI of PC/GEOS was "to this day the most sophisticated UI technology ever built into an OS".[85]
From 1992 Sun also sold
Sun dropped the Solaris 2.x version numbering scheme after the Solaris 2.6 release (1997); the following version was branded Solaris 7. This was the first 64-bit release, intended for the new UltraSPARC CPUs based on the SPARC V9 architecture. Within the next four years, the successors Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 were released in 2000 and 2002 respectively.
Following several years of difficult competition and loss of server market share to competitors' Linux-based systems, Sun began to include Linux as part of its strategy in 2002. Sun supported both
In 2004, after having cultivated a reputation as one of Microsoft's most vocal antagonists, Sun entered into a joint relationship with them, resolving various legal entanglements between the two companies and receiving US$1.95 billion in settlement payments from them.[86] Sun supported Microsoft Windows on its x64 systems, and announced other collaborative agreements with Microsoft, including plans to support each other's virtualization environments.[87]
In 2005, the company released Solaris 10. The new version included a large number of enhancements to the operating system, as well as very novel features, previously unseen in the industry. Solaris 10 update releases continued through the next 8 years, the last release from Sun Microsystems being Solaris 10 10/09. The following updates were released by Oracle under the new license agreement; the final release is Solaris 10 1/13.[88]
Previously, Sun offered a separate variant of Solaris called
After the release of Solaris 10, the Solaris source code was opened under the
. Following the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, OpenSolaris continued to develop in open under illumos with illumos distributions.Oracle Corporation continued to develop Solaris, reverting new development back to the proprietary licensing; its next release was Oracle Solaris 11 in November 2011.
Java platform
The Java platform was developed at Sun by James Gosling in the early 1990s with the objective of allowing programs to function regardless of the device they were used on, sparking the slogan "Write once, run anywhere" (WORA). While this objective was not entirely achieved (prompting the riposte "Write once, debug everywhere"), Java is regarded as being largely hardware—and operating system—independent.
Java was initially promoted as a platform for client-side
The platform consists of three major parts: the Java programming language, the
Java is an object-oriented programming language. Since its introduction in late 1995, it became one of the world's most popular programming languages.[89]
Java programs are compiled to
The Java
On November 13, 2006, Sun announced it would be licensing its Java implementation under the GNU General Public License; it released its Java compiler and JVM at that time.[90]
In February 2009, Sun entered a battle with Microsoft and Adobe Systems, which promoted rival platforms to build software applications for the Internet.[91] JavaFX was a development platform for music, video and other applications that builds on the Java programming language.[91]
Office suite
In 1999, Sun acquired the German software company Star Division and with it the
The principal differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org were that StarOffice was supported by Sun, was available as either a single-user retail box kit or as per-user blocks of licensing for the enterprise, and included a wider range of fonts and document templates and a commercial quality spellchecker.[92] StarOffice also contained commercially licensed functions and add-ons; in OpenOffice.org these were either replaced by open-source or free variants, or are not present at all. Both packages had native support for the OpenDocument format.
Derivatives of OpenOffice.org continue to be developed, these are LibreOffice, Collabora Online and Apache OpenOffice.
Virtualization and datacenter automation software

In 2007, Sun announced the Sun xVM virtualization and datacenter automation product suite for commodity hardware. Sun also acquired VirtualBox in 2008. Earlier virtualization technologies from Sun like Dynamic System Domains and Dynamic Reconfiguration were specifically designed for high-end SPARC servers, and
On the client side, Sun offered
Database management systems
Sun acquired MySQL AB, the developer of the
Other software
Sun offered other software products for software development and infrastructure services. Many were developed in house; others came from acquisitions, including Tarantella, Waveset Technologies,
Sun's middleware product was branded as the Java Enterprise System (or JES), and marketed for web and application serving, communication, calendaring, directory, identity management and
Sun developed data center management software products, which included the
Sun produced compilers and development tools under the
Storage
Sun sold its own storage systems to complement its system offerings; it has also made several storage-related acquisitions. On June 2, 2005, Sun announced it would purchase
In 2006, Sun introduced the Sun StorageTek 5800 System, the first application-aware programmable storage solution. In 2008, Sun contributed the source code of the StorageTek 5800 System under the BSD license.[97]
Sun announced the Sun Open Storage platform in 2008 built with open source technologies. In late 2008 Sun announced the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage systems (codenamed Amber Road). Transparent placement of data in the systems' solid-state drives (SSD) and conventional hard drives was managed by ZFS to take advantage of the speed of SSDs and the economy of conventional hard disks.[98]
Other storage products included Sun Fire X4500 storage server and SAM-QFS filesystem and storage management software.
High-performance computing
Sun marketed the Sun Constellation System for high-performance computing (HPC). Even before the introduction of the Sun Constellation System in 2007, Sun's products were in use in many of the TOP500 systems and supercomputing centers:
- Harry Potter and Spider-Man).[99]
- Sun Fire X4500 was used by high-energy physics supercomputers to run dCache
- Sun Grid Engine was a popular workload scheduler for clusters and computer farms
- Sun Visualization System allowed users of the TeraGrid to remotely access the 3D rendering capabilities of the Maverick system at the University of Texas at Austin
- Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
The Sun HPC ClusterTools product was a set of Message Passing Interface (MPI) libraries and tools for running parallel jobs on Solaris HPC clusters. Beginning with version 7.0, Sun switched from its own implementation of MPI to Open MPI, and donated engineering resources to the Open MPI project.
Sun was a participant in the OpenMP language committee. Sun Studio compilers and tools implemented the OpenMP specification for shared memory parallelization.
In 2006, Sun built the TSUBAME supercomputer, which was until June 2008 the fastest supercomputer in Asia. Sun built Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in 2007. Ranger had a peak performance of over 500 TFLOPS, and was the sixth-most-powerful supercomputer on the TOP500 list in November 2008. Sun announced an OpenSolaris distribution that integrated Sun's HPC products with others.[100]
Staff

Notable Sun employees included
In 2005, Sun Microsystems was one of the first Fortune 500 companies that instituted a formal social media program.[101] Sun staff published articles on the company's blog site.[102] Staff were encouraged to use the site to blog on any aspect of their work or personal life, with few restrictions placed on staff, other than commercially confidential material. Jonathan I. Schwartz was one of the first CEOs of large companies to regularly blog; his postings were frequently quoted and analyzed in the press.[103][104]
Acquisition by Oracle

On September 3, 2009, the European Commission opened an in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle.[105] On November 9, 2009, the Commission issued a statement of objections relating to the acquisition.[106] Finally, on January 21, 2010, the European Commission approved Oracle's acquisition of Sun. The Commission's investigation showed that another open database, PostgreSQL, was considered by many users of this type of software as a credible alternative to MySQL and could to some extent replace the competitive strength that the latter currently represents in the database market.[107]
Sun was sold to Oracle Corporation in 2009 for $5.6 billion.[68]
Sun's staff were asked to share anecdotes about their experiences at Sun. A website containing videos, stories, and photographs from 27 years at Sun was made available on September 2, 2009.[108]
In October, Sun announced a second round of thousands of employees to be laid off, blamed partially on delays in approval of the merger.[109]
The transaction was completed in early 2010.[5]
In January 2011, Oracle agreed to pay $46 million to settle charges that it submitted false claims to US federal government agencies and paid "kickbacks" to systems integrators.[110] In February 2011, Sun's former Menlo Park, California, campus of about 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2) was sold, and it was announced that it would become headquarters for Facebook.[111][112] The sprawling facility built around an enclosed courtyard had been nicknamed "Sun Quentin". The campus is now the headquarters of Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms.[113]
On September 1, 2011, Sun India legally became part of Oracle. It had been delayed due to legal issues in Indian court.[citation needed]
See also
- Callan Data Systems
- Curriki#History
- Hackathon
- Liberty Alliance
- List of computer system manufacturers
- Open Source University Meetup
- Solbourne Computer
- Sun Certified Professional
References
- ^ "Company Info". Sun.com. Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on August 28, 2006. Retrieved December 4, 2006.
- ^ "Churchill Club Presents: Scott McNealy in Conversation With Ed Zander" (Press release). Churchill Club. February 24, 2011. Archived from the original on August 2, 2020. Retrieved October 13, 2019.
- ^ Lee, Matt (November 30, 2006). "Sun begins releasing Java under the GPL". Free Software Foundation. Retrieved June 14, 2011.
FSF president and founder Richard Stallman said, "I think Sun has contributed more than any other company to the free software community in the form of software. It shows leadership. It's an example I hope others will follow."
- ^ "Sun to Acquire MySQL". MySQL.com. 2008. Archived from the original on July 18, 2011. Retrieved March 10, 2018.
- ^ CNET News. Archived from the originalon August 21, 2010. Retrieved June 14, 2011.
- ^ Bechtolsheim, Andreas; Baskett, Forest & Pratt, Vaughan (March 1982). The SUN Workstation Architecture (PDF) (Technical report). Stanford University, Computer Systems Laboratory. STAN//CSL-TR-82-229. Retrieved July 28, 2009.
- ^ Tajnai, Carolyn. "Wellspring of Innovation: Sun Microsystems Spotlight". Stanford.edu. Archived from the original on May 17, 2009. Retrieved July 28, 2009.
- ^ Amar Bhide (September 28, 1989). Vinod Khosla and Sun Microsystems (Case study). Harvard Business School.
- ^ Nicholls, Bill (February 1989). "The Current Crop". BYTE. pp. 235–244. Retrieved October 8, 2024.
- ISBN 978-0-7627-4239-4.
- ^ "Mr. Scott McNealy". Sun.com. Sun Microsystems. April 24, 2005. Archived from the original on September 30, 2009. Retrieved September 17, 2009.
- ^ McGuinness, Jim (August 27, 2007). "SUNW = Stanford University Network Workstation". Jim McGuinness's Weblog. Archived from the original on August 16, 2010. Retrieved February 22, 2009.
- ^ Fiedler, Ryan (October 1983). "The Unix Tutorial / Part 3: Unix in the Microcomputer Marketplace". BYTE. p. 132. Retrieved January 30, 2015.
- ^ Vance, Ashlee (June 2, 2004). "Sun goes back to the future with Metropolis". The Register. Retrieved January 31, 2007.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems — Investor Relations: FAQ". Sun.com. Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on June 21, 2006. Retrieved January 23, 2007.
- Thestreet.com. Archived from the originalon October 14, 2009. Retrieved July 28, 2009.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems' Rise And Fall". Forbes. Retrieved December 27, 2021.
- ^ "The $1.7 trillion dot.com lesson". CNN. Retrieved February 13, 2020.
- CNET News. Archived from the originalon July 11, 2012. Retrieved July 13, 2007.
- ^ Vance, Ashlee (June 24, 2005). "Sun layoffs hit hundreds in US". The Register. Retrieved July 13, 2007.
- ZDNet. Archived from the originalon February 10, 2007. Retrieved July 13, 2007.
- ^ "Sun to add jobs in Hillsboro". Portland Business Journal. January 16, 2004. Archived from the original on September 5, 2005. Retrieved July 14, 2007.
- ^ Simonson, Sharon (May 11, 2006). "Sun to sell Newark campus, move 2,300 workers". San Jose Business Journal. Archived from the original on June 22, 2011. Retrieved June 14, 2011.
- ^ "CDO2 Unlocks The Power of Sun Grid for Faster Financial Risk Simulation" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. August 24, 2005. Archived from the original on June 5, 2011. Retrieved December 16, 2009.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems Welcomes Endorsement and Investment From KKR" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. January 23, 2007. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved February 15, 2007.
- ^ Suk, Pavel (2006). "Offshoring Software Development" (PDF) (presentation by Sun to the OECD). Archived from the original (PDF) on September 10, 2008.
- ^ Vance, Ashlee (November 14, 2008). "Crisis Hits Tech Sector With Layoffs as Sales Slump". The New York Times.
- ^ England, Nick. "Trancept Systems". DotCSw.com. Retrieved May 12, 2007.
- ^ "Sitka Corp". Software Magazine. March 1992. Archived from the original on January 22, 2005. Retrieved April 20, 2012 – via FindArticles.com.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems Acquires Folio, Inc" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. September 6, 1988. Retrieved November 12, 2007.
- ^ "Sun's SunSelect Acquires Windows-Under-Unix Emulation Firm Praxsys". Computergram International. September 18, 1992.
- ^ Brown, Ken Spencer (May 31, 2002). "Sun pitches software savvy as it pushes past server identity". San Jose Business Journal. Archived from the original on October 26, 2012.
- ^ a b "Sun Microsystems announces intent to purchase Cray Business Systems Division" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. May 17, 1996. Archived from the original on October 23, 2012. Retrieved March 20, 2011.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems, Inc. acquires LongView Technologies LLC" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. February 18, 1997. Archived from the original on December 5, 2006. Retrieved March 10, 2007.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems completes acquisition of DIBA, pioneer in information appliance industry" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. August 25, 1997. Archived from the original on September 1, 2007. Retrieved March 10, 2007.
- ^ "Sun expands network software business to embedded systems market; agrees to acquire Chorus Systems" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. September 10, 1997. Archived from the original on December 5, 2006. Retrieved May 13, 2007.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems signs definitive agreement to acquire Encore Computer's storage business" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. July 17, 1997. Archived from the original on December 5, 2006.
- ^ "Michael Boucher". LinkedIn. Retrieved June 25, 2014.
- ^ Hendrickson, Susan Smith (July 19, 1998). "Will a big company buy your startup?". San Francisco Business Times.
- CNET News. Archived from the originalon July 11, 2012.
- CNET News. Archivedfrom the original on February 14, 2015. Retrieved September 29, 2011.
- ^ Fisheraug, Lawrence M. (August 24, 1999). "Sun Microsystems to Buy Forte in $540 Million Deal". The New York Times.
- ^ Shankland, Stephen (July 24, 2000). "Sun snaps up software company Gridware". CNET. Archived from the original on January 19, 2013. Retrieved May 18, 2007.
- ^ King, Carol (September 19, 2000). "Sun Takes a Shine to Cobalt". InternetNews.com. Archived from the original on November 15, 2004. Retrieved May 18, 2007.
- CNET News. Archived from the originalon January 19, 2013. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
- ^ "Sun buys InfraSearch". www.bizjournals.com. March 7, 2001. Retrieved February 3, 2020.
- ^ Cheung, Natasha (March 19, 2002). "Sun buys Clustra for iPlanet". InformationAge. Archived from the original on September 27, 2007. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
- CNET News. Archived from the originalon January 19, 2013. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
- CNET News. Archived from the originalon January 19, 2013. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
- CNET News. Archived from the originalon January 19, 2013. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems To Acquire Pixo". TechWeb. June 26, 2003. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
- ^ a b "Sun Facts Acquisitions History". Sun.com. Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on April 24, 2009. Retrieved July 16, 2009.
- ^ a b "Sun completes acquisition of Waveset Technologies, Inc" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. December 10, 2003. Archived from the original on September 5, 2006. Retrieved January 1, 2007.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems enhances network services integration into blades platform; Signs agreement to acquire Nauticus Networks" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. January 2, 2004. Archived from the original on December 31, 2006. Retrieved March 10, 2007.
- ^ Shankland, Stephen (February 10, 2004). "Sun to buy Opteron server maker, reclaim co-founder". CNET. Archived from the original on January 20, 2013. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
- ^ "Sun Completes Acquisition Of Sevenspace" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. January 11, 2005. Archived from the original on December 30, 2006. Retrieved October 3, 2007.
- ^ Kawamoto, Dawn; Shankland, Stephen (May 10, 2005). "Sun to buy Tarantella". CNET. Archived from the original on January 19, 2013. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
- ^ LaMonica, Martin (June 28, 2005). "Sun to buy integration outfit SeeBeyond". CNET. Archived from the original on January 19, 2013. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems Completes Acquisition of StorageTek" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. August 31, 2005. Archived from the original on April 1, 2007.
- ^ "Sun to Acquire Aduva" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. February 22, 2006. Archived from the original on September 8, 2006. Retrieved May 17, 2007.
- ^ "Sun to Bolster Identity Management Leadership and Service Offerings With Acquisition of Neogent" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. September 27, 2006. Archived from the original on October 9, 2007. Retrieved November 13, 2007.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems Expands High Performance Computing Portfolio with Definitive Agreement to Acquire Assets of Cluster File Systems, Including the Lustre File System" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. September 12, 2007. Archived from the original on October 2, 2007. Retrieved September 13, 2007.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems Strengthens Market-Leading Identity Management Portfolio with Intent to Acquire Vaau" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. November 13, 2007. Archived from the original on October 20, 2012. Retrieved November 13, 2007 – via Information Week.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems Announces Completion of MySQL Acquisition; Paves Way for Secure, Open Source Platform to Power the Network Economy" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. February 26, 2008. Archived from the original on February 28, 2008. Retrieved February 26, 2008.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire innotek, Expanding Sun xVM Reach to the Developer Desktop" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. February 12, 2008. Archived from the original on February 13, 2008. Retrieved February 12, 2008.
- ^ "Sun Welcomes Innotek". Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on March 2, 2008. Retrieved February 26, 2008.
On February 20 Sun completed the acquisition of innotek
- ^ "Sun Microsystems Expands Cloud Computing Offerings with Acquisition of Q-layer" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. January 6, 2009. Archived from the original on January 22, 2009. Retrieved January 6, 2009.
- ^ EDGAR. United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Retrieved June 4, 2011.
- ^ "Oracle Buys Sun" (Press release). Oracle. April 20, 2009.
- ISBN 0-387-97250-1.
- ^ Sooman, Derek (September 13, 2004). "Sun plans to use UltraSparc IV chip to provide a superior server". TechSpot. Retrieved July 12, 2012.
- CNET News. Retrieved July 12, 2012.
- ^ Vance, Ashlee (April 4, 2007). "Sun breaks omerta for UltraSPARC IV+ speed bump". The Register. Retrieved July 12, 2012.
- ^ Morgan, Timothy Prickett (October 13, 2008). "Sun takes four-socket Victoria Falls Sparc plunge". The Register. Retrieved July 12, 2012.
- ^ "Sun T5440 Oracle BI EE World Record Performance" (Press release). Oracle BestPerf blog. July 21, 2009. Retrieved July 12, 2012.
- ^ "How Sun's need to control the code cost them the company". ZDNet. Retrieved July 2, 2022.
- ^ Sun Microsystems Archived December 3, 2005, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Sun And Intel Announce Landmark Agreement" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. January 22, 2007. Archived from the original on January 24, 2007. Retrieved January 23, 2007.
- ^ "OpenSolaris & Intel Xeon Processors" (Press release). YouTube. April 30, 2008. Archived from the original on December 11, 2021. Retrieved May 12, 2008.
- ^ "AMD Expands Charter for the OpenSolaris OS and Sun xVM at the AMD Operating System Research Center" (Press release). AMD. May 5, 2008. Archived from the original on January 16, 2009.
- ^ Staff writer (February 1991). "Microsystems' New Divisions". The New York Times: D4. Archived from the original on May 25, 2015.
- ^ Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (November 20, 2006). "Study on the: Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU" (PDF). European Union. p. 51. Archived from the original (PDF) on January 24, 2007. Retrieved January 25, 2007.
- ^ John, Burgess (January 7, 1988). "AT&T to Buy Stake In Sun Microsystems". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on March 27, 2007. Retrieved January 23, 2007.
American Telephone & Telegraph Co. announced yesterday that it will buy up to a 20 percent stake in Sun Microsystems Inc., a Silicon Valley-based maker of powerful small computers known as workstations.
- ISBN 978-0-596-00323-4. Retrieved November 9, 2021.
In the spring of 1988, AT&T and Sun Microsystems signed a joint development agreement to merge the two versions of Unix.
- ^ Camen, Kroc (August 24, 2006). "GEOS: The Graphical Environment Operating System". OSNews. Archived from the original on March 21, 2023.
- ^ "Microsoft and Sun Microsystems Enter Broad Cooperation Agreement; Settle Outstanding Litigation" (Press release). Microsoft Corporation, Sun Microsystems. April 2, 2004. Archived from the original on March 22, 2006. Retrieved June 16, 2008.
- ZDNet. Archived from the originalon September 15, 2007. Retrieved February 6, 2008.
- ^ Oracle Corporation (February 8, 2013). "Oracle Solaris 10 1/13". Oracle Web site. Retrieved March 13, 2013.
- ^ "TIOBE Programming Community Index". TIOBE Software. June 2007. Archived from the original on November 29, 2007. Retrieved July 5, 2007. Java was ranked 1st as of June 2007, and has ranked 1st, 2nd or 3rd in this index since its inception in 2001.
- ^ "Sun Opens Java". Sun Microsystems Web site. November 13, 2006. Archived from the original on January 24, 2007. Retrieved January 25, 2007.
- ^ San Jose Mercury News. Retrieved March 2, 2009.
- ^ "Product Comparison". Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on August 24, 2008. Retrieved September 18, 2008.
- ^ "Sun Microsystems to acquire Innotek". Forbes. February 12, 2008. Archived from the original on December 2, 2010.
- ^ "Helping Dolphins Fly". Sun Microsystems. January 16, 2008. Archived from the original on January 17, 2008. Retrieved February 28, 2008.
- ^ "Optimize MySQL Server on Sun x64 Servers and Storage". Sun Microsystems. February 2006. Archived from the original on March 10, 2008. Retrieved February 28, 2008.
- ^ "Sun-Netscape alliance targets e-commerce with new brand identity" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. January 25, 2000. Archived from the original on January 7, 2007. Retrieved January 1, 2007.
- ^ "OpenSolaris Project: HoneyComb Fixed Content Storage". Sun Microsystems. February 2008. Archived from the original on April 22, 2007. Retrieved February 28, 2008.
- ^ "Solaris ZFS Enables Hybrid Storage Pools: Shatters Economic and Performance Barriers" (PDF). Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original (PDF) on February 19, 2009. Retrieved April 9, 2009.
- ^ Lustre File System presentation. Google Video. Archived from the original on February 10, 2012. Retrieved January 28, 2008.
- ^ "OpenSolaris Project: HPC Stack". OpenSolaris Community. 2009. Archived from the original on September 6, 2008. Retrieved June 4, 2011.
- Wikidata Q105074887.
- ^ "Blogs.sun.com". Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on January 5, 2010.
- ^ Konrad, Rachel (September 16, 2006). "Sun CEO Among the Few Chiefs Who Blog". The Washington Post. Retrieved June 4, 2011.
- ^ Jones, Del (June 26, 2006). "Sun CEO sees competitive advantage in blogging". USA Today. Retrieved June 4, 2011.
- ^ "Mergers: Commission opens in-depth investigation into proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle". European Commission. September 3, 2009. Retrieved January 30, 2021.
- ^ "Commission File Number: 0-15086". United States Securities And Exchange Commission. November 3, 2009. Retrieved January 30, 2021.
- ^ Alexandre Laurent (January 21, 2010). "Rachat de Sun par Oracle : l'Europe donne son feu vert" (in French). Clubic.
- ^ "A Tribute to Sun Microsystems". mysunw.com (previously thenetworkisthecomputer.com). 2009. Archived from the original on July 7, 2013. Retrieved September 15, 2013.
- CNET News. Archived from the originalon August 19, 2011. Retrieved July 29, 2022.
- ^ "Oracle to pay $46 million in false claims case". Reuters. January 31, 2011. Archived from the original on October 22, 2012. Retrieved June 4, 2011.
- CNET News. Archived from the originalon November 2, 2012. Retrieved June 14, 2011.
- ^ Benny Evangelista (February 9, 2011). "Facebook updates info: Menlo Park welcomes move Menlo Park opens arms to Facebook". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved June 14, 2011.
- ^ Savitz, Eric (January 2, 2011). "Facebook Staffers: Sentenced To Sun Quentin?". Forbes. The Tech Trade blog. Retrieved June 14, 2011.
Further reading
- Hall, Mark; Barry, John (1990). Sunburst: The Ascent of Sun Microsystems. Chicago: Contemporary Books. OCLC 232948325.
- Southwick, Karen (1999). High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems. New York: John Wiley. OCLC 41404354.
External links
- Historical business data for Sun Microsystems:
- SEC filings
- "Oracle and Sun". Oracle Corporation. Archived from the original on February 2, 2021. Retrieved June 7, 2021. Post-merge web site (removed in February 2021).
- "System news for Sun Users". A weekly third-party summary of news about Sun and its products published since 1998.