Sun Microsystems
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Type   Public (NASDAQ: SUNW)   
Founded   1982   
Headquarters   Santa Clara, California, USA   
Key people   Scott McNealy, Chairman
Jonathan I. Schwartz, President and CEO
Crawford W. Beveridge, Executive Vice President, People and Places, and CHRO
Greg Papadopoulos, Executive Vice President and CTO   
Industry   Computer hardware, software   
Products   computer servers and workstations and supporting software, Java language, and more   
Revenue   US$11.07 billion (2005)[2]   
Operating income   US$377.0 million (2005)[2]
(-4.9% operating margin [1])   
Net income   US$107.0 million (2005)[2]
(-4.4% profit margin [1])   
Employees   31,000 (2005)[1]   
Website   www.sun.com   

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) is a vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information-technology services, founded in 1982. It is headquartered in Santa Clara, California (part of Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

Sun is known as the developer of innovative technologies such as the Java platform and NFS, and as a champion of open systems in general and UNIX in particular; it has recently emerged as one of the leading proponents of open source software. Its products include computer servers and workstations based on its own SPARC and AMD's Opteron processors, storage systems, and a suite of software products including the Solaris Operating System, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management applications. Sun's manufacturing facilities are located in Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland.


Brief history

The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He originally designed this "68000 Unix system" for the communications project Stanford University Network, building it from spare parts resourced from the Department of Computer Science [1] and Silicon Valley supply houses.[2] The first Sun workstations ran a Version 7 Unix System port by Unisoft on 68000 processor-based machines.[3]

In February 1982, Bechtolsheim, fellow Stanford graduate students Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy, and Bill Joy (a primary developer of BSD), founded the company now known as Sun Microsystems.

The company name is derived from the initials for Stanford University Network, also reflected in the company's stock symbol, SUNW, which now stands for Sun Worldwide.

Other Sun luminaries include early employees John Gilmore and James Gosling. 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". James Gosling led the team which developed the Java programming language. Most recently, Jon Bosak led the creation of the Extensible Markup Language specification at W3C.

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