American computer company, 1982?2010
"SunSoft, Inc." redirects here. For the Japanese video game company, see
Sunsoft
.
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Logo used from the 1990s until acquisition by
Oracle
|
Headquarters campus in Santa Clara, California
|
Company type
| Public
|
---|
| |
---|
Industry
| |
---|
Founded
| February 24, 1982
; 42 years ago
(
1982-02-24
)
|
---|
Founders
| |
---|
Defunct
| January 27, 2010
; 14 years ago
(
2010-01-27
)
|
---|
Fate
| Acquired by
Oracle Corporation
|
---|
Headquarters
| ,
U.S.
|
---|
Products
| |
---|
Owner
| Oracle Corporation
(2010)
|
---|
Number of employees
| 38,600 (near peak, 2006)
[1]
|
---|
Website
| www
.sun
.com
(see:
archived version
at the
Wayback Machine
)
|
---|
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
(
Sun
for short) was an American technology company that sold
computers
,
computer components
,
software
, and
information technology
services and created the
Java programming language
, the
Solaris operating system
,
ZFS
, the
Network File System
(NFS), and
SPARC
microprocessors
. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them
Unix
,
RISC processors
,
thin client
computing, and
virtualized computing
. Notable Sun acquisitions include
Cray Business Systems Division
,
Storagetek
, and
Innotek GmbH
, creators of
VirtualBox
. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982.
[2]
At its height, the Sun headquarters were in
Santa Clara, California
(part of
Silicon Valley
), on the former west campus of the
Agnews Developmental Center
.
Sun products included
computer servers
and
workstations
built on its own
RISC
-based
SPARC processor architecture
, as well as on
x86
-based
AMD
Opteron
and
Intel
Xeon
processors. Sun also developed its own
storage
systems and a suite of software products, including the
Solaris operating system
, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and
identity management
applications. Technologies included the
Java platform
and
NFS
.
In general, Sun was a proponent of open systems, particularly Unix. It was also a major contributor to
open-source software
, as evidenced by its $1 billion purchase, in 2008, of
MySQL
, an open-source
relational database management system
.
[3]
[4]
At various times, Sun had manufacturing facilities in several locations worldwide, including
Newark, California
;
Hillsboro, Oregon
; and
Linlithgow, Scotland
. However, by the time the company was acquired by
Oracle Corporation
, it had outsourced most manufacturing responsibilities.
On April 20, 2009, it was announced that
Oracle would acquire Sun
for
US$
7.4 billion. The deal was completed on January 27, 2010.
[5]
History
[
edit
]
Sun Microsystems logo history
|
Logo
|
Years
|
|
Original Sun Microsystems logo, as used on the nameplate of the
Sun-1
workstation
|
|
Revised logo, used from 1983 to 1996
|
|
From 1996 until 2010 / acquisition by Oracle Corporation
|
|
The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation, the
Sun-1
, was conceived by
Andy Bechtolsheim
when he was a graduate student at
Stanford University
in
Palo Alto
, California. Bechtolsheim originally designed the
SUN workstation
for the
Stanford University Network
communications project as a personal
CAD workstation
. It was designed around the
Motorola 68000 processor
with an advanced
memory management unit
(MMU) to support the Unix operating system with
virtual memory
support.
[6]
He built the first examples from spare parts obtained from Stanford's
Department of Computer Science
and Silicon Valley supply houses.
[7]
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 name "Sun" is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network (SUN).
[9]
[10]
[11]
Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982.
By 1983, Sun was known for producing
68k-based systems
with high-quality graphics that were the only computers other than
DEC
's
VAX
to run
4.2BSD
. It licensed the
computer design
to other manufacturers, which typically used it to build
Multibus
-based systems running Unix from
UniSoft
.
[12]
Sun's initial public offering was in 1986 under the
stock symbol
SUNW
, for
Sun Workstations
(later
Sun Worldwide
).
[13]
[14]
The symbol was changed in 2007 to
JAVA
; Sun stated that the
brand awareness
associated with its Java platform better represented the company's current strategy.
[15]
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
[
edit
]
During the
dot-com bubble
, Sun began making more money, with its stock rising as high as $250 per share.
[16]
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.
[17]
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,
[18]
[19]
[20]
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.
[21]
In 2006, the rest of the Newark campus was put on the market.
[22]
Post-crash focus
[
edit
]
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
Sun Grid
, a
grid computing
deployment on which it offered
utility computing
services priced at US$1 per CPU/hour for processing and per GB/month for storage. This offering built upon an existing 3,000-CPU server farm used for internal R&D for over 10 years, which Sun marketed as being able to achieve 97% utilization. In August 2005, the first commercial use of this grid was announced for financial risk simulations which were later launched as its first
software as a service
product.
[23]
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
GAAP
basis for the third quarter 2005, as reported on April 14, 2005. In January 2007, Sun reported a net GAAP profit of $126 million on revenue of $3.337 billion for its fiscal second quarter. Shortly following that news, it was announced that
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
(KKR) would invest $700 million in the company.
[24]
Sun had engineering groups in
Bangalore
,
Beijing
,
Dublin
,
Grenoble
,
Hamburg
,
Prague
,
St. Petersburg
,
Tel Aviv
,
Tokyo
,
Canberra
and
Trondheim
.
[25]
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.
[26]
Sun acquisitions
[
edit
]
- 1987: Trancept Systems, a high-performance graphics hardware company
[27]
- 1987: Sitka Corp, networking systems linking the Macintosh with IBM PCs
[28]
- 1987: Centram Systems West, maker of
networking software
for PCs, Macs and Sun systems
- 1988: Folio, Inc., developer of intelligent font scaling technology and the
F3
font format
[29]
- 1991:
Interactive Systems Corporation
's Intel/Unix OS division, from
Eastman Kodak Company
- 1992: Praxsys Technologies, Inc., developers of the Windows emulation technology that eventually became
Wabi
[30]
- 1994:
Thinking Machines Corporation
hardware division
- 1996:
Lighthouse Design
, Ltd.
[31]
- 1996:
Cray Business Systems Division
, from
Silicon Graphics
[32]
- 1996: Integrated Micro Products, specializing in
fault tolerant
servers
- 1996: Thinking Machines Corporation software division
- February 1997:
LongView Technologies
, LLC
[33]
- August 1997: Diba, technology supplier for the Information Appliance industry
[34]
- September 1997:
Chorus Systemes SA
, creators of
ChorusOS
[35]
- November 1997:
Encore Computer
Corporation's storage business
[36]
- 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
[37]
- July 1998: NetDynamics
[38]
?developers of the
NetDynamics Application Server
[39]
- October 1998: Beduin,
[40]
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: Forte Software, an enterprise software company specializing in integration solutions and developer of the
Forte 4GL
[41]
- 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
[42]
- September 2000:
Cobalt Networks
, an Internet appliance manufacturer for $2 billion
[43]
- December 2000: HighGround, with a suite of Web-based management solutions
[44]
- 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.
[45]
- March 2002: Clustra Systems
[46]
- June 2002:
Afara Websystems
, developed SPARC processor-based technology
[47]
- September 2002: Pirus Networks, intelligent storage services
[48]
- November 2002:
Terraspring
, infrastructure automation software
[49]
- June 2003:
Pixo
, added to the Sun Content Delivery Server
[50]
- August 2003: CenterRun, Inc.
[51]
- December 2003: Waveset Technologies, identity management
[52]
- January 2004 Nauticus Networks
[53]
- February 2004: Kealia, founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, developed AMD-based 64-bit servers
[54]
- January 2005: SevenSpace, a multi-platform managed services provider
[55]
- May 2005:
Tarantella, Inc.
(formerly known as
Santa Cruz Operation
(SCO)), for $25 million
[56]
- June 2005: SeeBeyond, a
Service-Oriented Architecture
(SOA) software company for $387m
[57]
- June 2005:
Procom Technology
, Inc.'s NAS IP Assets
[51]
- August 2005:
StorageTek
, data storage technology company for $4.1 billion
[58]
- February 2006: Aduva, software for Solaris and Linux patch management
[59]
- October 2006: Neogent
[60]
- April 2007:
SavaJe
, the SavaJe OS, a Java OS for mobile phones
- September 2007:
Cluster File Systems
, Inc.
[61]
- November 2007: Vaau, Enterprise Role Management and identity compliance solutions
[62]
- February 2008:
MySQL AB
, the company offering the open source database MySQL for $1 billion.
[63]
- February 2008:
Innotek GmbH
, developer of the
VirtualBox
virtualization product
[64]
[65]
- April 2008:
Montalvo Systems
, x86 microprocessor startup acquired before first silicon
- January 2009: Q-layer, a software company with cloud computing solutions
[66]
Major stockholders
[
edit
]
As of May 11, 2009, the following shareholders held over 100,000
common shares
of Sun
[67]
and at $9.50 per share offered by Oracle,
[68]
they received the amounts indicated when the acquisition closed.
Hardware
[
edit
]
For the first decade of Sun's history, the company positioned its products as technical
workstations
, competing successfully as a low-cost vendor during the Workstation Wars of the 1980s. It then shifted its hardware product line to emphasize servers and storage. High-level telecom control systems such as
Operational Support Systems
service predominantly used Sun equipment.
[
citation needed
]
Motorola-based systems
[
edit
]
Sun originally used
Motorola 68000 family
central processing units for the
Sun-1
through
Sun-3
computer series. The Sun-1 employed a 68000 CPU, the
Sun-2
series, a
68010
. The Sun-3 series was based on the
68020
, with the later Sun-3x using the
68030
.
[69]
SPARC-based systems
[
edit
]
In 1987, the company began using
SPARC
, a RISC processor architecture of its own design, in its computer systems, starting with the
Sun-4
line. SPARC was initially a
32-bit
architecture (SPARC V7) until the introduction of the SPARC V9 architecture in 1995, which added
64-bit
extensions.
Sun developed several generations of SPARC-based computer systems, including the
SPARCstation
,
Ultra
, and
Sun Blade
series of workstations, and the SPARCserver,
Netra
,
Enterprise
, and
Sun Fire
line of servers.
In the early 1990s the company began to extend its product line to include large-scale
symmetric multiprocessing
servers, starting with the four-processor SPARCserver 600MP. This was followed by the 8-processor SPARCserver 1000 and 20-processor SPARCcenter 2000, which were based on work done in conjunction with
Xerox PARC
. In 1995 the company introduced
Sun Ultra series
machines that were equipped with the first 64-bit implementation of SPARC processors (
UltraSPARC
). In the late 1990s the transformation of product line in favor of large 64-bit SMP systems was accelerated by the acquisition of Cray Business Systems Division from Silicon Graphics.
[32]
Their 32-bit, 64-processor
Cray Superserver 6400
, related to the SPARCcenter, led to the 64-bit
Sun Enterprise 10000
high-end server (otherwise known as
Starfire
or E10K).
In September 2004, Sun made available systems with
UltraSPARC IV
[70]
which was the first multi-core SPARC processor. It was followed by UltraSPARC IV+ in September 2005
[71]
and its revisions with higher clock speeds in 2007.
[72]
These CPUs were used in the most powerful, enterprise class high-end
CC-NUMA
servers developed by Sun, such as the Sun Fire E15K and the
Sun Fire E25K
.
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
SPARC64 VI
and later processors. The
M-class
SPARC Enterprise systems include high-end reliability and availability features. Later T-series servers have also been badged SPARC Enterprise rather than Sun Fire.
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),
[73]
[74]
which is considered a record in the industry.
Since 2010, all further development of Sun machines based on SPARC architecture (including new
SPARC T-Series
servers,
SPARC T3
and
T4
chips) is done as a part of Oracle Corporation hardware division.
x86-based systems
[
edit
]
In the late 1980s, Sun also marketed an
Intel 80386
-based machine, the
Sun386i
; this was designed to be a hybrid system, running
SunOS
but at the same time supporting
DOS
applications. This only remained on the market for a brief time. A follow-up "486i" upgrade was announced but only a few prototype units were ever manufactured.
[75]
Sun's brief first foray into
x86
systems ended in the early 1990s, as it decided to concentrate on
SPARC
and retire the last
Motorola
systems and 386i products, a move dubbed by McNealy as "all the wood behind one arrowhead". Even so, Sun kept its hand in the
x86
world, as a release of
Solaris
for
PC compatibles
began shipping in 1993.
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.
[76]
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
Intel
.
[77]
Intel endorsed Solaris as a mainstream operating system and as its mission critical
Unix
for its
Xeon
processor-based systems, and contributed engineering resources to
OpenSolaris
.
[78]
Sun began using the Intel Xeon processor in its
x64
server line, starting with the Sun Blade X6250 server module introduced in June 2007.
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.
[79]
Software
[
edit
]
Logo of SunSoft, the company's dedicated software division, established in 1991
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
vi
editor, the
C shell
, and significant work developing
TCP/IP
and the
BSD Unix
OS. Sun later developed software such as the
Java programming language
and acquired software such as
StarOffice
,
VirtualBox
and
MySQL
. In February 1991, the company established SunSoft, Inc., a wholly owned division of Sun dedicated to the development of operating systems and application software.
[80]
Sun used community-based and open-source licensing of its major technologies, and for its support of its products with other open source technologies.
GNOME
-based desktop software called
Java Desktop System
(originally code-named "Madhatter") was distributed for the Solaris operating system, and at one point for Linux. Sun supported its
Java Enterprise System
(a
middleware
stack) on Linux. It released the source code for Solaris under the
open-source
Common Development and Distribution License
, via the OpenSolaris community. Sun's positioning includes a commitment to indemnify users of some software from intellectual property disputes concerning that software. It offers support services on a variety of pricing bases, including per-employee and per-socket.
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.
[81]
According to this report, Sun's open source contributions exceed the combined total of the next five largest commercial contributors.
Operating systems
[
edit
]
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
suntools
, an early
GUI
window system
.
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.
[82]
UNIX
System V Release 4
(SVR4) was jointly developed by AT&T and Sun.
[83]
Sun used SVR4 as the foundation for Solaris 2.x, which became the successor to SunOS 4.1.x (later retroactively named Solaris 1.x). By the mid-1990s, the ensuing
Unix wars
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".
[84]
From 1992 Sun also sold
Interactive Unix
, an operating system it acquired when it bought Interactive Systems Corporation from Eastman Kodak Company. This was a popular Unix variant for the PC platform and a major competitor to market leader
SCO UNIX
. Sun's focus on Interactive Unix diminished in favor of Solaris on both SPARC and x86 systems; it was dropped as a product in 2001.
[
citation needed
]
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
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
on its x64 systems; companies such as
Canonical Ltd.
,
Wind River Systems
and
MontaVista
also supported their versions of Linux on Sun's SPARC-based systems.
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.
[85]
Sun supported Microsoft Windows on its x64 systems, and announced other collaborative agreements with Microsoft, including plans to support each other's virtualization environments.
[86]
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.
[87]
Previously, Sun offered a separate variant of Solaris called
Trusted Solaris
, which included augmented security features such as
multilevel security
and a
least privilege
access model. Solaris 10 included many of the same capabilities as Trusted Solaris at the time of its initial release; Solaris 10 11/06 included Solaris Trusted Extensions, which give it the remaining capabilities needed to make it the functional successor to Trusted Solaris.
After the release of Solaris 10, the Solaris source code was opened under the
CDDL
free software
license and developed in open with contributing
Opensolaris community
through
SXCE
that used
SVR4
.pkg
packaging and supported
OpenSolaris
releases that used
IPS
.
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
[
edit
]
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
applets
running inside web browsers. Early examples of Java applications were the
HotJava
web browser
and the
HotJava Views
suite. However, since then Java has been more successful on the
server side
of the Internet.
The platform consists of three major parts: the Java programming language, the
Java Virtual Machine
(JVM), and several
Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
. The design of the Java platform is controlled by the vendor and user community through the
Java Community Process
(JCP).
Java is an
object-oriented programming
language. Since its introduction in late 1995, it became one of the world's most popular programming languages.
[88]
Java programs are compiled to
byte code
, which can be executed by any JVM, regardless of the environment.
The Java
APIs
provide an extensive set of library routines. These APIs evolved into the
Standard Edition
(Java SE)
, which provides basic infrastructure and GUI functionality; the
Enterprise Edition
(Java EE)
, aimed at large software companies implementing enterprise-class application servers; and the
Micro Edition
(Java ME)
, used to build software for devices with limited resources, such as mobile devices.
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.
[89]
In February 2009, Sun entered a battle with Microsoft and Adobe Systems, which promoted rival platforms to build software applications for the Internet.
[90]
JavaFX
was a development platform for music, video and other applications that builds on the Java programming language.
[90]
Office suite
[
edit
]
In 1999, Sun acquired the German software company Star Division and with it the
office suite
StarOffice
, which Sun later released as
OpenOffice.org
under both
GNU LGPL
and the SISSL (
Sun Industry Standards Source License
). OpenOffice.org supported
Microsoft Office
file formats (though not perfectly), was available on many platforms (primarily Linux, Microsoft Windows,
Mac OS X
, and Solaris) and was used in the
open source community
.
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.
[91]
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
[
edit
]
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
Logical Domains
only supports the UltraSPARC T1/T2/T2 Plus server platforms. Sun marketed
Sun Ops Center
provisioning software for datacenter automation.
On the client side, Sun offered
virtual desktop
solutions. Desktop environments and applications could be hosted in a datacenter, with users accessing these environments from a wide range of client devices, including Microsoft Windows PCs,
Sun Ray virtual display clients
,
Apple
Macintoshes, PDAs or any combination of supported devices. A variety of networks were supported, from LAN to WAN or the public Internet. Virtual desktop products included
Sun Ray Server Software
,
Sun Secure Global Desktop
and
Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
.
Database management systems
[
edit
]
Sun acquired MySQL AB, the developer of the
MySQL
database in 2008 for US$1 billion.
[92]
CEO
Jonathan Schwartz
mentioned in his blog that optimizing the performance of MySQL was one of the priorities of the acquisition.
[93]
In February 2008, Sun began to publish results of the MySQL performance optimization work.
[94]
Sun contributed to the
PostgreSQL
project. On the Java platform, Sun contributed to and supported
Java DB
.
Other software
[
edit
]
Sun offered other software products for software development and infrastructure services. Many were developed in house; others came from acquisitions, including Tarantella, Waveset Technologies,
[52]
SeeBeyond, and Vaau. Sun acquired many of the
Netscape
non-browser software products as part a deal involving Netscape's merger with
AOL
.
[95]
These software products were initially offered under the "iPlanet" brand; once the Sun-Netscape alliance ended, they were re-branded as "
Sun ONE
" (Sun Open Network Environment), and then the "
Sun Java System
".
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
service-oriented architecture
. Sun's
Open ESB
and other software suites were available free of charge on systems running Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
HP-UX
, and Windows, with support available optionally.
Sun developed data center management software products, which included the
Solaris Cluster
high availability software, and a grid management package called
Sun Grid Engine
and firewall software such as SunScreen.
For
Network Equipment Providers
and telecommunications customers, Sun developed the Sun Netra High-Availability Suite.
Sun produced compilers and development tools under the
Sun Studio
brand, for building and developing Solaris and Linux applications.
Sun entered the
software as a service
(SaaS) market with
zembly
, a social cloud-based
computing platform
and Project Kenai, an open-source project hosting service.
Storage
[
edit
]
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
Storage Technology Corporation
(StorageTek) for US$4.1 billion in cash, or $37.00 per share, a deal completed in August 2005.
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.
[96]
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.
[97]
Other storage products included Sun Fire X4500 storage server and SAM-QFS filesystem and storage management software.
High-performance computing
[
edit
]
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:
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.
[99]
Staff
[
edit
]
Notable Sun employees included
John Gilmore
,
Whitfield Diffie
,
Radia Perlman
,
Ivan Sutherland
, and
Marc Tremblay
. Sun was an early advocate of Unix-based networked computing, promoting TCP/IP and especially NFS, as reflected in the company's motto
The Network is the Computer
, coined by
John Gage
.
James Gosling
led the team which developed the
Java programming language
.
Jon Bosak
led the creation of the
XML
specification at
W3C
.
In 2005, Sun Microsystems was one of the first
Fortune 500
companies that instituted a formal
social media
program.
[100]
Sun staff published articles on the company's blog site.
[101]
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.
[102]
[103]
Acquisition by Oracle
[
edit
]
On September 3, 2009, the European Commission opened an in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle.
[104]
On November 9, 2009, the Commission issued a statement of objections relating to the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.
[105]
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.
[106]
Sun was sold to Oracle Corporation in 2009 for $5.6 billion.
[67]
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.
[107]
In October, Sun announced a second round of thousands of employees to be laid off, blamed partially on delays in approval of the merger.
[108]
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.
[109]
In February 2011, Sun's former
Menlo Park, California
, campus of about 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m
2
) was sold, and it was announced that it would become headquarters for
Facebook
.
[110]
[111]
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
.
[112]
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
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
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Further reading
[
edit
]
External links
[
edit
]
- Historical business data for Sun Microsystems:
- SEC filings
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