Sun Microsystems took its name from the Stanford University Network. Graduate student Andy Bechtolsheim built the first workstation from spare parts and a Motorola 68000, with a memory management unit that let Unix run virtual memory on a desktop. With Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Berkeley Unix pioneer Bill Joy, he launched Sun in February 1982, and it was profitable by July. Sun went public in 1986 as SUNW, led the workstation market by 1989, and adopted John Gage’s motto “the network is the computer.” It moved to its own SPARC RISC processors and built Solaris and the Network File System, and in the mid-1990s James Gosling’s Java promised “write once, run anywhere.”

Sun gave away software like Java to grow the network and sold expensive SPARC servers to carry the traffic, and during the dot-com boom its stock hit $250. When the bubble burst, bankrupt startups dumped barely used Sun servers, and the stock fell below $10 by late 2002. In 2005 the Sun Grid rented computing at $1 per CPU hour, but it required applications rewritten for Sun’s architecture, while Amazon Web Services ran on commodity hardware. Sun bought StorageTek, VirtualBox developer Innotek and MySQL, yet losses mounted. Oracle agreed in 2009 to buy Sun for $7.4 billion, about $5.6 billion net, and the deal closed in 2010.

• Mark Zuckerberg left Sun’s faded logo on the back of Meta’s Menlo Park sign as a warning to employees.
• Developers joked that Java’s motto was really “write once, debug everywhere.”
• Sun was described as the world’s largest corporate contributor to open source software.
• The UltraSPARC T1, code-named Niagara, ran 32 threads on eight cores.
• After the 2008 crisis the stock lost 80% of its remaining value and Sun cut 18% of its workforce.