Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems is a Silicon Valley-based computer and software manufacturer.

Sun's products include computer servers and workstations based on the SPARC processor, the SunOS and Solaris operating system, the NFS network file system, the Java programming language, and together with AT&T the standardization of Unix System V Release 4. Its less successful ventures included the NeWS window system and the OpenLook[?] graphical user interface.

The initial design for the Unix workstation was conceived when the founders were graduate students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

The company name SUN originally stood for Stanford University Network. Founders include Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolsheim[?]. Only Bill Joy and McNealy remain with Sun now.

Sun has an interesting logo designed by a prof called Vaughan Pratt[?] at Stanford.

Sun luminaries include Bill Joy and James Gosling. John Gilmore was an early employee. Bill Joy was invited when he was developing BSD in UC Berkeley under the aegis of Ken Thompson initially. James Gosling and his fellows developed Java programming language. In years, Sun became the world-class company, a thought leader.

Initially, Sun provided BSD UNIX called "SUN OS" as an operating system for workstation but later with AT&T it corporated BSD UNIX and System V into Solaris, which is rather akin to System V.

Sun originally used Motorola 68000 as cpu architecture but later it developed SPARC, which employs RISC architecture.

Sun is known for its open source publications and licenses of all of its major technologies. Though a late realizer, it included Linux as part of its strategy. But Sun has been facing tough times as Linux started eating away its part of the server market pie.

Sun published OpenOffice.org under copyleft GNU GPL and Sun's original license. As office suite, OpenOffice.org is often compared with Microsoft Office, ported to many platforms and often used in open source community. StarSuite is a closed product based on OpenOffice.org.

Sun bought OpenOffice.org from a German software company StarOffice and released as open source project, which is largely prised in open source community. Initially, it was under Sun's original license but later applied GNU GPL.

Solaris supports GNOME and CDE as its desktop environment.

J2EE is used to compete with Microsoft's .Net strategy.

JXTA is a P2P architecture designed to be used not only on the computer, but on PDAs or cellular phones as well.

N1[?] aims at bringing the concept of the world being one gaint computer.

• Company ticker: SUNW at Nasdaq Market Capital: $54,584 M as of May 2003.

Sun's site http://www.sun.com/