Sun Microsystems

Open full sized image

The Sun Microsystems computer workstation was intended to be more accessible and replicable than expensive mainframe or minicomputer systems.

Courtesy of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems, former American manufacturer of computer workstations, servers, and software. In 2010 the company was purchased by Oracle Corporation, a leading provider of database management systems.

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. Those 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 prominent hardware and software engineers. In 1983 the company signed a multimillion-dollar original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with Computervision Corporation, to develop 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 (CEO) to his own presidential duties. McNealy was the key executive who struck the strategic deals with Sun’s initial equity investors and major customers, which at that time included Eastman Kodak Company, American Telephone and Telegraph Company (now AT&T Corporation), 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 surpassed $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.

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—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 (IBM), and the Hewlett-Packard Company—shifted their product research and development, marketing, and sales investments away from their own operating systems in favor of UNIX.

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 in its primary product lines.

Despite its technical and financial strengths, the company faced growing competition in the 1990s from versions of so-called Wintel machines that used Microsoft Corporation’s high-end Windows NT operating system and Intel Corporation’s most-advanced 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.

In 1996 Sun joined an Oracle-led effort to build a network computer (NC) to rival Wintel’s dominance in business. Designed to use applications and data that resided on separate servers, the NC had minimal capabilities of its own. By 1998 the NC initiative had faltered. However, the project sowed the seeds for the purchase of Sun by Oracle a decade later.

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 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’s Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Such versatility made Java a popular language to use when writing applications for the Internet 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 in 2003 won a reversal before a three-judge federal appeal panel 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 televisions with Internet connectivity—but also for use in personal digital assistants (PDAs) and various automotive and household appliance interfaces as well. In 1998 Motorola, Inc., signed a licensing agreement with Sun to use Java in its cell phones and pagers. In response, Microsoft joined the competition with a smaller version of its operating system, Windows CE, for use in network devices and appliances.