Sun Microsystems, Inc.

▪ American company

Introduction

 American manufacturer of computer workstations, servers, and software. Its headquarters are in Palo Alto, Calif.

Founding and growth

      Andreas Bechtolsheim, William Joy, Vinod Khosla, and Scott McNealy founded Sun Microsystems, Inc., in 1982 for the purpose of selling low-cost, high-performance desktop computers running the UNIX operating system. These computer workstations found immediate acceptance among engineers, software developers, and scientists who benefited from having dedicated machines, rather than sharing more expensive minicomputers or mainframe computer systems.

      Unlike its Fortune 500 competitors, Sun did not have revenue from other sources to fund development of its computer workstations. This meant that the company needed hundreds of millions of dollars in start-up investments, as well as large purchase agreements, in order to develop a hardware manufacturing infrastructure and to attract top-flight hardware and software engineers. In 1983 the company signed a multimillion-dollar original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with Computervision Corporation, a designer of computer-aided design and engineering programs. This was the first of many large OEM agreements through which Sun built computers for companies that sold the workstations under their own labels.

      In 1984 McNealy added Khosla's titles of chairman and chief executive officer to his own presidential duties. McNealy was the key executive who struck the strategic deals with Sun's initial equity investors and major customers, at that time including the Eastman Kodak Company, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T Corporation) (now AT&T Corporation (AT&T Corporation)), Olivetti & C. SpA (Olivetti & C. SpA), and Xerox Corporation. Kodak and AT&T had taken equity positions in the young company, and all four became major OEM partners for Sun equipment. These arrangements brought the company strong revenue and profit growth. In 1988, six years after start-up, Sun passed $1 billion in annual sales—only Compaq Computer Corporation had reached the billion-dollar mark faster—and the company had shown only one quarter without profits.

An open system approach

      By using the UNIX operating system, which had long been a part of the computer science curriculum in universities worldwide, Sun was able to claim that its workstations incorporated international standards and were therefore “open,” whereas its competitors' products were “closed” because they used proprietary operating systems. Moreover, UNIX computers were used during the development of ARPANET (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)—the predecessor to the Internet—which had been established by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1969. This combination of UNIX and universities helped place Sun's computers among the most common Internet servers. In large part because of the success of Sun's marketing position, its major competitors, Digital Equipment Corporation, International Business Machines Corporation, and the Hewlett-Packard Company, (Hewlett-Packard Company) shifted their product research and development, marketing, and sales investments away from their own operating systems in favour of UNIX.

Network systems (computer network)

      Sun later sold many new and replacement network systems to the U.S. government. In 1986 Sun made its largest single sale of computers to a government agency when the National Security Agency signed an agreement for $500 million worth of Sun equipment.

      Sun's engineers pioneered many important technologies adopted by the computer industry. In 1984 it released its Network File System software, which became a standard for computer file sharing across networks. In 1987 Sun became the first large computer company to use reduced-instruction-set computing ( RISC) microprocessors (microprocessor) in its primary product lines.

Wintel competition

      Despite its technical and financial strengths, the company faced growing competition in the 1990s from so-called Wintel machines—computers running Microsoft Corporation's Windows NT operating system on Intel Corporation's Pentium microprocessors. Although Sun's equipment, especially its high-end SPARC microprocessor architecture, was generally much faster and more reliable than Wintel systems, it was more expensive and far more complex to operate. Wintel computers controlled more than 85 percent of the worldwide market share for desktop systems, but they had a much smaller share of the market for the more profitable high-performance workstation and server systems used in business and on the Internet. Sun generally sold well in the server market, where performance was usually more important than price.

Java

      McNealy was famous for his assertion that “the network is the computer,” which epitomized Sun's approach to networking interoperability. In 1995 Sun introduced the Java programming language (computer programming language) to overcome some of the problems associated with networking different manufacturers' machines, often running different operating systems. According to its supporters, Java was a “Write once, run anywhere” computer language, meaning that software written in Java would not have to be rewritten for each computer operating system. If it ran on a UNIX computer, it should also run on a Windows machine or a Macintosh through the use of a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JVMs were shipped with UNIX, Windows, Macintosh, and other systems as well as with Internet browsers such as Netscape (Netscape Communications Corp.)'s Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Such versatility made Java a popular language to use when writing applications for the World Wide Web and, to many observers, seemed to portend a diminishing importance for individual operating systems.

      However, in 1997 Microsoft released a JVM that was incompatible with other JVMs, in effect breaking the “Write once, run anywhere” promise of the program. In November 1998 a U.S. federal judge issued a preliminary injunction preventing Microsoft from distributing further copies of its version of Java. Although Microsoft won a reversal before a three-judge federal appeal panel in 2003 on being forced to distribute Java with its operating system, the court also upheld the injunction preventing Microsoft from distributing its own version of Java.

      Sun also developed Java to enable a return to simpler and cheaper terminal-like network devices, particularly for database inquiry systems—such as airline reservation systems, inventory control systems, and Internet television devices—but also for use in personal digital assistants (PDAs) and various automotive and household appliance interfaces as well. In 1998 Motorola, Inc., (Motorola, Inc.) signed a license agreement with Sun to use Java in its pagers and cellular telephones. In response, Microsoft joined the competition with a smaller version of its operating system, Windows CE, for use in network devices and appliances.

      In 1999 Sun acquired the StarOffice software suite, a competitor of Microsoft's Office suite (primarily Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), and distributed it for free under the name OpenOffice. Sun moved more forcefully into the open-source (open source) movement in 2005, releasing some 1,600 patents to the public domain, and followed up the next year by making Java open-source. In 2008 Sun bought the software developer MySQL AB and continued to support MySQL as an open-source database program.

Mark Hall

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