The original Sun workstation was called the SPARCstation. It was designed by Andreas Bechtolsheim while he was a graduate student at Stanford University. Bechtolsheim's project captured the interest of two experienced computer engineers, Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy. The three men, along with UNIX guru William Joy, formed Sun Microsystems, Inc. in 1982. In 1986 the company went public.
Sun achieved success in the 1980s by providing technical workstations principally to financial institutions and telecommunications companies. Its network file sharing (NFS) technology was introduced in 1984 and licensed free to the computer industry. In 1986 NFS technology for the personal computer brought network computing to PC users.
Sun's alliance with AT&T to develop a UNIX system for business computing began in 1987. Sun became the leader in the workstation market, with revenue reaching $1 billion in 1988, making Sun the fastest growing computer company with a direct sales force in history.
In the early 1990s the company began to address the wider commercial market of enterprise computing. It introduced two families of servers for networked enterprises in 1992 and 1993. In 1993 the company shipped its one millionth system and joined the Fortune 500. Sun's week-long Enterprise Computing Summit marked the coming of age of enterprise computing in 1994.
In 1995 Sun introduced Java, the first universal software platform. In 1996 Sun licensed Java to all major hardware and software companies. Java 2, the next generation of Java technology, was introduced in 1998. It delivered more speed and flexibility. In 1998 and 1999 Sun acquired several smaller companies that were developing Java applications, Internet connectivity, and software. Sun hoped that Java would become a universal Internet operating system and an alternative to proprietary operating systems such as Microsoft's Windows NT. Java technology running on Sun's network-based operating system allowed a Web browser to download small applications from the server to the desktop, where they would run locally.
In 1998 the Sun-Netscape alliance was formed when America Online acquired Netscape Communications. The Sun-Netscape alliance, which later became iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions, promoted Internet server software to start-up Internet companies. iPlanet products also made it easy for companies to make the transition to electronic commerce. The iPlanet Web Server was introduced at the beginning of 2000; it brought the former Netscape product upto-date with Java technology and could run on Linux and Windows NT as well as Solaris. In 2001 Sun announced that iPlanet would become a division of Sun in 2002.
In the late 1990s Sun expanded its software product line as part of its strategy to become an independent software vendor. It acquired application server vendor NetDynamics and network software developer I-Planet, Inc. in 1998 and Forte Software for $540 million in 1999. In 1999 Sun also acquired the Star Companies for $60 million and StarOffice GmbH for $14 million, primarily for their office productivity software.
Major acquisitions in 2000 included software developer Innosoft, which Sun acquired for $42 million. Sun planned to incorporate Innosoft's messaging and directory services technology into its iPlanet Directory Server 5.0, due February 2001. Sun acquired Trustbase, the United Kingdom-based parent company of JCP, for $21 million. Its secure public key infrastructure enabling technology was used in business-to-business e-commerce.
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