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60-613: The Sun Public License (SPL) is a software license that applies to some open-source software released by Sun Microsystems (such as NetBeans before the 5.5 version). It has been approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as a free software license, and by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as an open source license . It is derived from the Mozilla Public License . This license has been superseded by

120-462: A 20% stake in Sun. UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4) was jointly developed by AT&T and Sun. 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

180-460: A Gigabit Ethernet startup focused on developing high-speed network switches . In 1996, Cisco Systems acquired the firm for $ 220 million, with Bechtolsheim owning 60%. He became vice president and general manager of Cisco's Gigabit Systems Business Unit, until leaving the company in December 2003 to head Kealia, Inc. Bechtolsheim founded Kealia in early 2001 with Stanford Professor David Cheriton ,

240-525: A cloud-based interface for mobile and computer websites in 2009. He was reportedly an early investor in Claria Corporation , which ceased operating in 2008. From 2015 to 2017, Bechtolsheim invested in PerimeterX, an automated attack mitigation SaaS . Bechtolsheim received a Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation in 1999 and a Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the year award. He was also elected

300-416: A consistent design philosophy. 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

360-491: 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 . 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 . Sun began using the Intel Xeon processor in its x64 server line, starting with

420-580: A member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2000 for contributions to the design of computer workstations and high-performance network switching. Bechtolsheim gave the opening keynote speech at the International Supercomputing Conference in 2009. In 2012, he was voted by IT Pros as the person who contributed most to server innovation in the last 20 years. In 2024, Bechtolsheim settled insider trading allegations with

480-496: A nearby company based on the Intel 8008 , which he then programmed in binary code as he had no access to assemblers . Royalties from the product supported much of his education. Bechtolsheim entered the Jugend forscht contest for young researchers, and after entering for three years, won the physics prize in 1974. He began studying electrical engineering with a focus on data processing at

540-708: 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. Sun had engineering groups in Bangalore , Beijing , Dublin , Grenoble , Hamburg , Prague , St. Petersburg , Tel Aviv , Tokyo , Canberra and Trondheim . 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

600-763: A partner in Granite Systems, to work on advanced server technologies using the Opteron processor from Advanced Micro Devices . In February 2004, Sun Microsystems announced it was acquiring Kealia in a stock swap. Due to the acquisition, Bechtolsheim returned to Sun again as senior vice president and chief architect. Kealia hardware technology was used in the Sun Fire X4500 storage product. Along with Cheriton, in 2005 Bechtolsheim launched another high-speed networking company, Arastra. Arastra later changed its name to Arista Networks . Bechtolsheim left Sun Microsystems to become

660-655: A primary developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders. The company was the second, after rival Apollo Computer , to specialize in workstations. The name "Sun" is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network (SUN). 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

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720-437: 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. Sun supported Microsoft Windows on its x64 systems, and announced other collaborative agreements with Microsoft, including plans to support each other's virtualization environments. In 2005,

780-732: 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 . At various times, Sun had manufacturing facilities in several locations worldwide, including Newark, California ; Hillsboro, Oregon ; and Linlithgow, Scotland . However, by

840-481: 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. According to this report, Sun's open source contributions exceed the combined total of the next five largest commercial contributors. Sun is best known for its Unix systems, which have a reputation for system stability and

900-568: Is Solaris 10 1/13. Andy Bechtolsheim Bechtolsheim was born at Hängeberg am Ammersee , located in Finning , Landsberg , Bavaria, the second of four children. The isolated house had no television or close neighbors, so he experimented with electronics as a child. His family moved to Rome in 1963. Five years later, in 1968, the family relocated again, to Nonnenhorn on Lake Constance in Germany. At age 16, he designed an industrial controller for

960-518: 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), 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)

1020-589: 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

1080-504: Is done as a part of Oracle Corporation hardware division. 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. Sun's brief first foray into x86 systems ended in

1140-516: The Common Development and Distribution License , which is also derived from the MPL . This free and open-source software article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. ( Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers , computer components , software , and information technology services and created

1200-506: 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

1260-801: 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. He built the first examples from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses. On February 24, 1982, Scott McNealy , Andy Bechtolsheim , and Vinod Khosla , all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems . Bill Joy of Berkeley,

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1320-628: 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

1380-544: 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 . 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

1440-635: The Technical University of Munich with the support of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Andreas was annoyed that the students did not have access to computers and frustrated by his studies at the time, he went to Carnegie Mellon University in 1975 with the help of a Fulbright scholarship , and obtained his Master's degree in Computer Engineering in 1976. In 1977, Bechtolsheim moved to Silicon Valley based on

1500-522: The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in which he agreed to pay a civil penalty of nearly $ 1 million, and is prohibited from serving as an officer or director of a public company for five years. The SEC accused him of misusing confidential knowledge of Cisco's proposed acquisition of Acacia Communications, stating that the illegal option trades netted over $ 400,000 in profits between his associate and relative, to whom he passed

1560-582: The dot-com bubble , Sun began making more money, with its stock rising as high as $ 250 per share. 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. 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, and other cost cutting. In December 2001,

1620-617: The Chairman and Chief Development Officer of Arista in October, 2008, but stated he still was associated with Sun in an advisory role. Bechtolsheim and Cheriton were two of the first investors in Google , investing US$ 100,000 each in September 1998. When he gave the check to Larry Page and Sergey Brin , Google's founders, the company had not yet been legally incorporated. Claims that Bechtolsheim coined

1680-774: 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,

1740-528: 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

1800-514: The Newark campus was put on the market. 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

1860-646: 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. 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

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1920-600: The SUN project. Support was provided by the Computer Science Department and DARPA . The modular computer was used for research projects such as developing the V-System , and for early Internet routers . Bechtolsheim tried to interest other companies in manufacturing the workstations, but only got lukewarm responses. One of the companies building computers for VLSI design was Daisy Systems , where Vinod Khosla worked at

1980-533: 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. 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

2040-586: 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,

2100-568: The amounts indicated when the acquisition closed. 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. Sun originally used Motorola 68000 family central processing units for

2160-403: 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

2220-418: The company's current strategy. 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. During

2280-472: 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. As of May 11, 2009, the following shareholders held over 100,000 common shares of Sun and at $ 9.50 per share offered by Oracle, they received

2340-725: 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". From 1992 Sun also sold Interactive Unix , an operating system it acquired when it bought Interactive Systems Corporation from Eastman Kodak Company. This

2400-402: 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

2460-441: 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. 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

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2520-431: 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

2580-610: 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

2640-512: 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

2700-537: The name "Google" are untrue. However, he did motivate the founders to officially organize the company under that name. As a result of investments like these, Bechtolsheim was seen as one of the most successful " angel investors ", particularly in areas such as electronic design automation (EDA), which refers to the software used by people designing computer chips. He has made a number of successful investments in EDA. In one such EDA company, Magma Design Automation , his stake

2760-632: 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

2820-460: The offer of an Intel internship from Justin Rattner . When Rattner moved to Oregon, Bechtolsheim instead went to Stanford University and became a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering . At Stanford, Bechtolsheim designed a powerful computer (called a workstation ) with built-in networking called the SUN workstation , a name derived from the initials for the Stanford University Network . It

2880-464: 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 . Sun's initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol SUNW , for Sun Workstations (later Sun Worldwide ). The symbol was changed in 2007 to JAVA ; Sun stated that the brand awareness associated with its Java platform better represented

2940-402: 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. In 2006, the rest of

3000-600: The team developing the BSD series of Unix operating systems at UC Berkeley ; Bill is usually counted as the fourth member of the founding team. For a while Bechtolsheim and Joy shared an apartment in Palo Alto, California . The first product, the Sun-1 , included the Stanford CPU board design with improved memory expansion, and a sheet-metal case. By the end of the year, the experimental Ethernet interface designed by Bechtolsheim

3060-491: 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. 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

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3120-730: 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. 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")

3180-529: The time. Khosla had graduated a couple of years earlier from the Stanford Graduate School of Business with Scott McNealy , who managed manufacturing at Onyx Systems . Khosla, McNealy and Bechtolsheim wrote a short business plan and quickly received funding from venture capitalists in 1982. Bechtolsheim left Stanford to co-found the company, Sun Microsystems , as employee number one, with McNealy and Khosla, and with Bill Joy , who had been part of

3240-511: 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. 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

3300-572: Was accelerated by the acquisition of Cray Business Systems Division from Silicon Graphics. 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 which was the first multi-core SPARC processor. It was followed by UltraSPARC IV+ in September 2005 and its revisions with higher clock speeds in 2007. These CPUs were used in

3360-517: 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

3420-564: Was founded on February 24, 1982. 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

3480-570: Was inspired by the Xerox Alto computer developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center . Bechtolsheim was a "no fee consultant" at Xerox, meaning he was not remunerated directly but had free access to the research being done there. At the time, Lynn Conway was using workstations to design very-large-scale integration (VLSI) circuits. Bechtolsheim's advisor was Forest Baskett . In 1980, Vaughan Pratt also provided leadership to

3540-451: Was replaced by a commercial board from 3Com . Sun Microsystems had its initial public offering in 1986 and reached $ 1 billion in sales by 1988. Bechtolsheim formed a project code-named UniSun around this time to design a small, inexpensive desktop computer for the educational market. The result was the SPARCstation 1 (known as "campus"), the start of another line of Sun products. In 1995, Bechtolsheim left Sun to found Granite Systems,

3600-834: Was valued around $ 60 million. He was an early investor in another EDA start-up company, Co-Design Automation, which developed SystemVerilog which is used to design almost all digital hardware. Bechtolsheim invested in Tapulous , the maker of music games for the Apple iPhone . Tapulous was acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 2010. He joined George T. Haber, a former colleague at Sun, to invest in wireless chip company CrestaTech in 2006 and 2008. Bechtolsheim invested in all of Haber's previous startups: CompCore purchased by Zoran , GigaPixel purchased by 3Dfx and Mobilygen purchased by Maxim Integrated Products in 2008, as well as Moovweb ,

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